Bitcoin Difficulty Increases For The 9th Consecutive Time, Hash Rate Nears ATH

Bitcoin difficulty has now reached 22.67 trillion after a 4.69% increase on Sunday. This latest jump in difficulty was the 9th consecutive increase since mid-June. The next difficulty will now be happening just before the end of this month at an estimated increase of 1.11%, taking it to 22.93 trillion. This is the longest positive difficulty adjustment streak since more than three years back when the bull market reached its pinnacle, and the bear market ensued. Seventeen increases in a row were recorded between early December 2017 and early July 2018. The all-time high Bitcoin difficulty reached was at 25 trillion in mid-May, as per BTC.com. Bitcoin hash rate is also nearing its ATH at 197.6 TH/s from mid-May as we continue to climb ever since late June bottom at 68 Th/s. The hash rate has currently reached 175.3 Th/s as China’s mining share gets successfully deployed in the United States, Kazakhstan, and Russia. Amidst this, the transaction count on the Bitcoin network is also rising to climb between 250k and 330k, up from 120k in mid-June. Meanwhile, on the Ethereum network, daily transactions have been above 1 million since last year and reached 1.5 million again after topping above 1.7 million in May, as per Etherscan. [coin_stats_table symbol="ETH"] However, the hash rate of the second-largest cryptocurrency is already at its ATH at 858,640.8968 GH/s, pumping since late June low of 477,535 GH/s due to China's crackdown on cryptocurrency mining. Average fees, however, on Ethereum is currently at $4.667 per transaction, while on Bitcoin, it's about half of that at $2.529, according to Ycharts. [deco-beg-single-coin-widget coin="BTC" graph="true"]