There were no signs of “Moonvember” thanks to the downfall of the FTX empire. This directly impacted Bitcoin [BTC] and its counterparts, along with the DeFi space as well as the BTC mining industry. The mining industry in particular has been in a rut. With profitability at a low, miners have been getting rid of their holdings. Amidst all of this, the mining difficulty of the world’s largest crypto dropped significantly since July 2021.
According to data, the difficulty of mining a block of Bitcoin plunged by 7.32 percent earlier today. Following the adjustment of block height 766,080, which adjusts every two weeks, the latest plummet was witnessed. It should be noted that this was the largest single-day drop since China’s mining crackdown that pushed the difficulty level by 28 percent.
As seen in the above tweet, the decreasing price of Bitcoin along with the increasing energy costs have forced miners to shut off their machines. At press time, BTC was trading for $17,017 with a 1.66 percent daily drop.
The mining difficulty is certainly related to the hashrate of Bitcoin mining. At present, the hash rate was at 268.18M.
This drop in BTC difficulty also reflected the conditions of the mining firms. Several platforms have been severely impacted by the downfall of BTC. Compute North went on to file for bankruptcy while others like Core Scientific and Argo Blockchain slumped with liquidity issues.
Prominent Bitcoin miner to switch mining pool
As mentioned earlier, November has been a rather difficult month for the industry. After failing to produce enough Bitcoins during the month, Riot Blockchain decided to switch its mining pool. The statement read,
“In order to ensure more predictable results going forward, Riot will be transitioning to another mining pool that offers a more consistent reward mechanism, so that Riot will fully benefit from our rapidly growing hash rate capacity as we work towards our goal of reaching 12.5 EH/s in the first quarter of 2023.”
However, it should be noted that in November 2022, the firm produced 521 BTC. Back in November 2021, Riot’s BTC production was at 466. Therefore, there was a 12 percent surge since last year. And as of November 30, 2022, the firm went on to deploy a whopping 72,428 miners. The hash rate capacity was further pushed to 7.7 exahash per second.
In addition to this, it produced 2 percent more BTC when compared to October. Despite all of this, the firm claims that it did not reach its desired level of production.