On July 21, 2022, at 2:14 p.m. (ET) at block height 745,920, Bitcoin’s mining difficulty dropped by 5.01% outpacing the last two epoch changes. The latest downward shift makes it 5% easier to find blocks than it was during the past two weeks, and roughly 8.77% easier since June 22.
It is now 11.39% easier to find a Bitcoin block since the difficulty peaked on May 10
Bitcoin miners took a breather this week as the Difficulty Adjustment Algorithm (DAA) adjusted lower for the third consecutive week. Network difficulty is basically measured by how difficult it is to find the correct hash for each block grant issued.
The difficulty epoch is assessed every 2,016 blocks, and if the time it takes to mine those blocks is too fast, difficulty increases, and if it’s too slow, the difficulty decreases. The last difficulty increase took place on June 8, 2022, at block height 739,872, as it rose 1.29% higher than the two weeks prior.
In the four weeks leading up to the last DAA change, the network saw two reductions. The first was on June 22 at block 741,888, as it fell 2.35% that day.
The second difficulty change that followed occurred on July 6, at block height 743,904. That particular drop was around 1.41% and the difficulty dropped to 29.15 trillion. Today, after block height 745,920, the difficulty is now 27.69 trillion, a parameter not seen since March 17, 2022.
As of this writing, it is 11.39% easier to find a bitcoin block than it was when the difficulty hit an all-time high on May 10, at a block height of 735,840. The record high was 31.25 trillion and so far 3.56 trillion has been cleared from the network difficulty.
During the last two weeks, prior to the most recent difficulty adjustment, BTC’s hashrate saw an average of around 197.4 exahash per second (EH/s). In the last 30 days, Foundry USA captured the most block subsidies as it found 926 blocks out of the 4,165 mined last month.
Foundry’s hashrate over the past month was around 22.23% of the entire global network. The mining operation was tracked by Antpool, which managed to find 638 reward blocks, and F2pool discovered 606 blocks.
Binance Pool found 505 blocks and during the past 30 days, Poolin captured 434 block rewards. There were 13 known bitcoin mining operations that found 4,108 blocks during the one-month span, while unknown hashrate, otherwise known as stealth miners, managed to find 57 blocks.
