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.
913EH/s
Hashrate, 17 March 2026
−16.2%
Change over ninety days
+13.0%
Change over one year
145.0T
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.
The subsidy runs down on a schedule
The block subsidy halves roughly every four years and is written into the protocol. Everything else about the security budget is a market outcome, but that part is a known arithmetic decline. The open question, and it has been open for a decade, is whether transaction fees grow into the gap or whether the budget simply gets smaller.
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.
