Bitcoin Miners Catch a Break: Network Difficulty Slides 3.34%

After four straight difficulty hikes beginning March 9, the Bitcoin network finally eased up—registering a 3.34% downward adjustment that offered miners a welcome moment of relief.

Bitcoin Network Sees First Difficulty Drop After 4 Consecutive Rises

Bitcoin’s difficulty declined for the first time since the March 9, 2025, increase, breaking a streak of four consecutive upward adjustments over the past eight weeks. At block height 895,104, the metric slipped by 3.34%, falling from 123.23 trillion to 119.12 trillion. The 119.12 trillion figure denotes the current Bitcoin network mining difficulty—a dynamic benchmark that defines how computationally demanding it is to unearth the next valid block.

Bitcoin difficulty according to stats collected by mempool.space.

In practical terms, this number estimates the volume of hash attempts a miner must, on average, execute to produce a block hash that meets the protocol’s target. Put differently, it signals the need for an immense 119.12 trillion possible guesses to mine a block, keeping the network anchored to its cadence of roughly one block every 10 minutes, irrespective of total hashpower.

Network hashrate according to hashrateindex.com on May 4, 2025.

As of Sunday, May 4, the network is running hot with 885.51 exahash per second (EH/s) of hashpower humming across the globe. Yet even with a difficulty reduction at block height 895,104, block times remain stubbornly above target—averaging 10 minutes and 22 seconds. If this pace holds, another downward difficulty adjustment is projected for May 18.

Still, the hashrate could shift at any moment, compressing block intervals and altering expectations. Meanwhile, miner profitability has climbed: hashprice, or the estimated daily revenue per petahash per second (PH/s) of SHA256 computation, jumped from $45.87 on Apr. 4 to $50.80 today. That uptick in revenue has helped lift the hashpower from 824 EH/s on April 27 to the current 885.51 EH/s.