Bitcoin (BTC) Hashrate Back at 1,000 EH/s as Ki Young Ju Flags Full-Capacity Mining

Update 20:01 UTC: The consultancy's verdict on the AI pivot is blunt: remaining miners should not expect the relief they hoped for, and if the projected 5.16% end-of-October adjustment lands, competition among operators still in the game will only sharpen.

Hashrate Recovery Meets Record Difficulty

The computing power securing the Bitcoin (BTC) network has fully recovered, with fresh CryptoQuant data as of October 22, 2026 placing True Hashrate at 1,000 EH/s, or 1 ZH/s, near the historical highs of late 2025. That rebound erases the decline recorded in the first half of the year and puts crypto mining back on a firm uptrend, even as the Bitcoin price slipped about 3.3% over the past 24 hours in our live reading. The recovery has already fed into the network's self-adjusting workload. Mining difficulty stands at a record 140.58 T after the October 16 recalculation lifted the bar by 5.92%, one of the largest increases of 2026, and the next adjustment, due at the end of October, is expected to add another 4–6%. Economics stay unforgiving at these levels. With BTC trading in the $80,000–$83,000 band and hashprice, the daily revenue per unit of computing power, near $37/PH, only operators running flagship ASIC machines rated at 9–12 J/TH and paying below $0.08–$0.10/kWh for electricity remain profitable; less efficient rigs on expensive power disconnect. The ownership structure behind the numbers has shifted too: companies listed on US exchanges now control roughly 35–40% of global hashrate, and their operational stability rests on direct investment from traditional financial institutions. Pools tied to public companies also depend less on short-term spot swings, since firm institutional contracts and partial integration of data centers for artificial intelligence workloads create a cushion. With more than a year and a half until the next Bitcoin halving in April 2028, large players have a window to expand, though a deep market correction would test even institutional margins.

The AI migration is not giving remaining miners any breathing room, according to BlocksBridge Consulting's latest Miner Weekly. Displaced capacity has been substantial: publicly traded miners posted a 23% decline in realized hashrate, while their AI and high-performance computing revenue rose 52% quarter over quarter, with roughly $1.5 billion in mining hardware taken offline. BlocksBridge now projects a 5.16% difficulty increase at the end-of-October adjustment, which would stack on the 5.92% jump from October 16 for a combined 11.4% rise across two consecutive recalculations. Some of the lost hardware may return through smaller operators buying secondhand machines, such as Sazmining's used Antminer S21 XP units deployable at hosting sites in Paraguay and Texas, though it is unclear how much sold equipment actually comes from public miners or how much has re-entered the network.

BlocksBridge's latest Miner Weekly adds a dating detail to the recovery: the 7-day average hashrate crossing 1 ZH/s is the highest reading since March 3, meaning the network needed roughly seven months to reclaim that level. The consultancy's verdict on the AI pivot is blunt: remaining miners should not expect the relief they hoped for, and if the projected 5.16% end-of-October adjustment lands, competition among operators still in the game will only sharpen. Its analysis also suggests the recomputed hashrate may partly reflect small and mid-sized players absorbing rigs that large miners sold off as they shifted to AI and high-performance computing, with secondhand Antminer S21 XP units, deployable at sites in Paraguay and Texas, potentially more economical than new machines where power is cheap. How much of that sold equipment actually returned to the network is still unverified.

Ki Young Ju's Institutional Read

CryptoQuant founder and CEO Ki Young Ju made the interpretation explicit in an October 22 post on X, writing that Bitcoin (BTC) hashrate is back in an uptrend and that miners are running at full capacity, while calling public miners backed by TradFi giants “an indirect bullish signal from institutional investors.” In his view, the current cycle marks mining's transition from a venture-sector niche to heavy industry controlled by corporate capital. Independent measurements support the trend. Coin Metrics-based estimates put the 30-day average hashrate near 995 EH/s as of October 20, above the 60-day average of 962 EH/s, a crossover that points to strengthening activity. SoChain's daily estimate for the same date reads about 1,153 EH/s, higher still, with the gap explained by volatile daily calculations and differing provider methods. None of these figures are directly measured: hashrate is estimated from block production data, so the headline level alone does not prove every facility runs its hardware at full utilization. Public miners such as MARA, Riot Platforms and CleanSpark need large amounts of capital and energy infrastructure, and access to equity and debt markets lets traditional finance channels fund that buildout, though not all of that capital flows into Bitcoin (BTC) production, since several companies are also investing in AI and high-performance computing data centers. The structural side effect is security. Under Bitcoin's proof of work design, distinct from Proof of Capacity systems, rewriting transaction history would require outspending the entire network's computing power, and difficulty readjusts every 2,016 blocks to hold block times near ten minutes. Ki Young Ju had already flagged, in an October 14 note, that selling pressure on miners is easing as the gap between production costs and the market price widens, meaning large miners need to sell less BTC to cover costs, a holding pattern that rhymes with a strategic Bitcoin reserve.

@ki_young_ju · X post

October 22 post on X.

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Demand Still Sets the Price

Our reading: the hashrate recovery hardens network security and confirms that institutional balance sheets now sit under the mining base, but it is not a buy signal on its own. Hashrate and price do not always move together, spot demand and capital inflows decide direction, and miners can keep expanding while investors sell. The margin math also tightens with every adjustment, so a record 140.58 T difficulty plus the expected 4–6% October increase will squeeze the operators least able to absorb it. The wider Bitcoin market carries its own downside watch, with related coverage flagging a $70,000 downside risk if daily closes stay below $81,000, and Nexo's Q4 outlook tying the next leg to the Fed. For the level-by-level map, our Bitcoin technical analysis tracks current support and resistance.