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19 Jul 2022
Largest negative difficulty readjustment since July 2021 scheduled on Thursday
Hashrate continues to decline, leading miner revenue to plunge despite climbing BTC prices.
The last week has seen a block discovery rate of 5.53 blocks per hour, far below the 6 blocks per hour target of the bitcoin network, as BTC’s hashrate declines towards March lows.Source: Blockchain.comThis will likely lead to a third consecutive negative difficulty adjustment on Thursday. The upcoming difficulty adjustment is estimated to a difficulty reduction of 5.9%, according to BTC.com. This would be the largest percentage decline in difficulty since July 3rd, 2021, a period that saw massive consecutive downward difficulty readjustments due to the Chinese mining ban. This indicates that large miners struggle to maintain operations amid the pressuring market conditions. The reduced hashrate is reflected in reduced miner revenues in the last week, falling to $17.7m. This is the lowest weekly miner revenue we’ve recorded as long as we’ve been tracking Bytetree’s miner revenue approximation. Source: BytetreeWhile the block production rate has seen a substantial fall, transaction fees have risen. This suggests that there is a high demand for block space. On Wednesday evening, July 13th, the median block fee rates reached a 1-year high of 29 sats/vByte, while the median transaction fee on Thursday, July 14th, averaged at 0.00011 BTC, the second-highest average transaction fee in 2022.