In May 2021, Beijing renewed efforts to regulate the cryptocurrency industry in China. Citing the poor state of the environment and the need to save electricity, which is, after all, crucial for mining cryptocurrencies, the Chinese government banned the practice of mining and exchanging digital tokens. This has caused a migration of miners from China to other parts of the world, as well as a decline in the value of major cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) or Cardano (ADA). Despite this, Ethereum’s hashrate has recently reached new records. So what is currently happening in the market?
What is hashrate?
Hashrate is a measure of computing power per second used during mining. In other words, hashrate is the speed at which tokens are mined in a given blockchain. It is measured in units of hash/second, which means how many calculations per second can be performed in one second.
Ethereum (ETH) hashrate records
Ethereum’s record hashrate was 715.4 TH/sec and was recorded in September 2021. For comparison, the previous record was 632.8 TH/s and was measured on May 19, 2021. The new record reaching over 715 TH/s indicates that miners have already completed the migration process after China’s restructuring of the law.
But it wasn’t just China’s actions that raised questions in this case. The Ethereum network recently underwent changes that were necessary for its further development. This, of course, refers to the London hard fork that was implemented in early August 2021. This hard fork led to the migration of Ethereum from proof-of-work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS).
Many believed that with the Ethereum upgrade, there was a massive retreat to other related networks such as Solana. However, contrary to assumptions, Ethereum miners have remained loyal to this ecosystem and are constantly engaged in mining new tokens. This is not surprising when you consider the growing demand for NFT tokens and decentralized applications from the DeFi sector.
Revival of not only Ethereum
All indications are that after the repression that China faced, miners are slowly starting to revive and mine tokens again, and not only from the Ethereum network. In fact, recently we can observe an increase in the hashrate of the most popular blockchain to date – Bitcoin (BTC). So it seems that a more convenient place to mine cryptocurrencies has been found.
