Bitcoin: Hashrate skyrockets by 27x since 2017; miners looking to spur price rally?

Bitcoin seems to be pulling a Usain Bolt; not in price, but with regard to mining difficulty.

As the price hovers just below the $13,000 mark, less than a thousand dollars behind its yearly high, the fundamentals of the coin are on the up-and-up.

Bitcoin recorded a hashrate of 65.87 EH/s earlier this week, as the price increased by over 10 percent over a 24-hour period. This trumped the previous high of 65.19 EH/s recorded last month.

Hashrate, an important metric that portrays mining difficulty and network performance, has soared to its all-time high, and the pace of the same was unforeseen.

Binance Research, the analytics wing of the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world, published a recent study on the Bitcoin network, with respect to its mining capabilities. The report added that since the beginning of 2017, when the price was just above $1,000 to present day, the hashrate has risen by a whopping 27x, with the price lagging behind.

“Hashrate has increased 27x since the beginning of 2017 and has been breaking all-time highs. In the same period, the USD price of BTC has increased 11x, demonstrating the increasing competition for block rewards between miners.”

Within the aforementioned period, the Bitcoin network saw its hashrate increase from 2.4EH/s to around 70EH/s, a massive 2800+ percent increase.

It should be noted that for a substantial part of the crypto-winter of 2018, the hashrate held steady. Only after the BCH hardfork which pulled the price to under $3,500 in December 2018, did the miners take a big hit. Since then however, the hashrate has been rising.

Not only in absolute terms, but also in relative terms is the hashrate on an incline. On a 7-day moving average basis, the total hashrate for BTC has increased by over 13.11 EH/s, charted for a period of 30 days. This is the “fastest pace,” for the rise of Bitcoin’s hashrate ever.

Binance’s Research report also read,

“Bitcoin’s total hashrate (7-day moving average) has increase by 13.11 EH/S over the past 30 days – its fastest pace ever. This hashrate is approximately equal to the hash power of 970,000 antminer S9s.”

However, as one goes up, another goes down. Bitcoin’s daily active addresses have not reflected the success of the miners. On July 7, the daily active BTC addresses dropped to its lowest level since the beginning of the recent bull run.

The April 2 address count was just shy of 700,000, while the metric recorded 655,000 on July 7.

With the next Bitcoin halving 10 months away and the price of Bitcoin only looking to surge upwards, can the miners play price catalysts?