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.
864EH/s
Hashrate, 22 August 2026
−22.4%
Change over ninety days
−9.9%
Change over one year
127.5T
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.
Hashrate is estimated, not measured
No one observes total hashrate directly. It is inferred from how quickly blocks arrive against the difficulty setting, which makes a single day’s figure noisy and a trend over months reliable. Anyone quoting a daily record to two decimal places is over-reading the data.
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.
