Hashrate is the amount of computing work being spent to produce bitcoin blocks. It is a cost, paid in electricity and capital, and it is the thing that makes rewriting the chain expensive. Reading it as a sentiment indicator is a category error; reading it as an industry’s capital expenditure is not.
1,064EH/s
Hashrate, 23 May 2026
+25.2%
Change over ninety days
+16.5%
Change over one year
136.6T
Current mining difficulty
Source: mempool.space, daily averages. Computed by Institutional Asset Journal.
Bitcoin network hashrate
Daily average, hashes per second.
Source: mempool.space, daily averages. Computed by Institutional Asset Journal.
Why an allocator should read a mining series
Security is a purchased good here. The network is expensive to attack because it is expensive to run, and the amount being spent is public. An allocator holding the asset in custody is relying on that spending continuing, which makes the revenue line of an industry most portfolios have never looked at into a risk input for the position they do hold.
How this was measured
- Hashrate, difficulty and per-block reward and fee averages are mempool.space daily series. Dollar figures apply the Coinbase daily close on the same date and assume the protocol’s target of 144 blocks a day, so a day that produced more or fewer blocks is smoothed. Rewards are the total paid to miners, subsidy plus fees, in satoshis per block; the fee share divides one by the other. Hashrate is a statistical estimate inferred from block times and difficulty rather than a measurement, and single-day readings are noisy for that reason, which is why the charts run long. A piece dated one day uses observations through the day before.
