Key points
- Difficulty rose 5.54% to 148.36 trillion at block 973,728 on Oct. 29, according to mempool.space data.
- It was the second jump of nearly 6% in two weeks, after a 5.92% rise on Oct. 16.
- The level is the highest since late November 2025, but still below the record of 155.97 trillion.
- Mining revenue per unit of hashrate has been falling, while several public miners shift capacity to AI.
Mining bitcoin just got harder again. The network's difficulty, the measure of how hard it is to find a new block, rose 5.54% to 148.36 trillion at block 973,728 on Oct. 29 at 19:14 UTC, according to data from mempool.space. It was the second increase of nearly 6% in a row, and it lifted difficulty to its highest level in about 11 months.
Two big jumps in two weeks
Bitcoin adjusts its difficulty every 2,016 blocks, roughly every two weeks, so that new blocks keep arriving about every 10 minutes no matter how much computing power joins or leaves the network. When miners add machines and blocks come faster, difficulty goes up; when they switch machines off, it goes down.
October has been a month of steep increases. The previous adjustment, on Oct. 16 at block 971,712, raised difficulty by 5.92% to 140.58 trillion, according to mempool.space and Newhedge data. Since the start of October, when difficulty stood at 132.72 trillion after a flat adjustment on Oct. 3, it has climbed by almost 12%.
The new level is the highest since Nov. 27, 2025, according to mempool.space's adjustment history. It is still below the all-time high of 155.97 trillion, set in October 2025.
