Bitcoin (BTC) Hashrate Rebounds Past 1 Zettahash From February Low

Hashrate Climbs Back Past 1 Zettahash

The Bitcoin (BTC) network pushed its computing power back above one zettahash per second on Tuesday, October 13, reclaiming ground lost during a 27% collapse in mining capacity earlier this year. Aggregated YCharts data compiled by Blockchain.com shows the hashrate at roughly 1.075 ZH/s on Tuesday, up from 1.003 ZH/s the day before. The reading arrives while the market side points the other way: the Bitcoin (BTC) price stands at $81,684, down 2.09% over the past 24 hours at the time of writing, on about $21.6 billion of daily volume. Hashrate measures the total computing power devoted to crypto mining, and it doubles as the security budget of this proof-of-work chain: the more machines race for blocks, the more an attack on the ledger costs. A zettahash equals one sextillion hashes per second, so Tuesday's figure means the network ran more than a thousand exahashes every second. At that scale the network ranks among the most heavily secured computing systems in operation. Against that, the trough was sharp. CoinShares' research puts hashrate near 1,160 EH/s as recently as last October, sliding to about 850 EH/s by early February, a fall of roughly 27%. The cause was arithmetic rather than sentiment. The coin's market value fell while mining difficulty stayed high and transaction fee income thinned, so the revenue earned by each unit of computing power collapsed. Hashprice, the industry's measure of daily revenue per petahash of hashrate, sank to an average of $27.70 per PH/s in June, the lowest daily reading on record. From that February floor of 850 EH/s, Tuesday's 1.075 ZH/s leaves computing power about a quarter higher, though still under the 1.1 ZH/s the Bitcoin (BTC) network carried at the end of last year.

Power Costs and the AI Datacenter Squeeze

What pulled computing capacity down ran deeper than price alone. CoinShares' account of the winter points to rising electricity costs in the Texas region, temporary curbs on power use and deteriorating weather, each cutting into the hours machines could run at a profit. A second pressure has built through the year: datacenters built for artificial intelligence are competing for the same grid connections, transformers and sites that miners depend on, and that contest for power and infrastructure keeps tightening. The revenue side, though, has started to turn. CoinShares' September report puts hashprice at about $38 per PH/s per day, a recovery from June's record-low $27.70 that leaves some operators able to cover their operating costs again. The difference between those two readings is straightforward: at $27.70 per PH/s the margin left little room to fund operations, at about $38 a portion of the fleet pays its own bills. Block subsidies are fixed by the halving schedule, so the swing between the two figures is a price and fee story rather than a change in how many coins each block pays out. Fee income remains the swing factor on top of the subsidy, and block-space demand, which has previously surged with waves such as Bitcoin Ordinals inscriptions, decides how much of it miners capture. One caution attaches to the headline number: daily hashrate readings move with block generation speed, so a single strong day does not by itself confirm a trend. The recovery also still sits below the 1.1 ZH/s the network carried at the end of last year, a reminder of how much capacity left the industry when margins turned negative. Whether computing power holds a stable band while the coin's volatility runs its course is what the coming weeks of readings will show.

The market has ground of its own to make up. Our composite support and resistance scoring puts the nearest ceiling at $83,997, scored 88 out of 100 and about 2.8% above the $81,684 spot price, with first support at $81,021 (83/100) just under it. Positioning reads unhurried: funding runs at 0.0018% on perpetuals while open interest sits near $15.8 billion. Momentum is mixed, an RSI of 47.65 beside a bearish MACD signal inside a trend our Bitcoin technical analysis filter still labels an uptrend. The distance to close is the story's arithmetic: compute has climbed about a quarter from February's 850 EH/s floor to 1.075 ZH/s, and price would need to clear $83,997 to point the same way.