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Mining difficulty is an average measure of how many hash operations miners must perform to mine a block. According to data from the Bitcoin network explorer Mempool, the difficulty decreased by approximately 11.2%. That’s the most since the China mining ban five years ago, when the hashrate, the total computational power used to mine blocks, dived 50% to 58 exahashes per second (EH/s) and BTC was gyrating around $30,000.
China declared a sweeping ban on crypto mining and started implementing a crackdown on cryptocurrencies in May 2021, leading to multiple negative difficulty adjustments between May and July 2021, ranging between 12.6% and 27.9%, historic data from CoinWarz shows.
Bitcoin’s mining difficulty stands at 125.86 trillion — down from 141.67T and took effect at block 935,429. This was also the 10th-largest negative percentage adjustment of all time.
The difficulty is recalibrated every 2,016 blocks to ensure that blocks continue to be mined at roughly 10-minute intervals. Prior to the latest difficulty adjustment, average block times hovered at approximately 11.4 minutes, slightly above the network’s 10-minute target.



 The sharp downward adjustment came amid a broad crypto market rout. The price of Bitcoin recently fell by over 50% from its all-time peak of around $126,000 to $60,000 lows, spurred by massive spot BTC exchange-traded fund (ETF) outflows and a wider risk-off sentiment across stocks and commodities.
The drop in mining difficulty provides some relief for miners by slightly improving the chances that each unit of computing power will secure a block reward. However, whether that provides meaningful financial relief will largely depend on Bitcoin’s price trajectory in the coming period.
At the time of writing, Bitcoin was trading at $69,661, up 0.88% over the past 24 hours. It’s now roughly 9.9% lower than it was a week ago, according to crypto price aggregator TradingView.
