Re-write this article 2/9/2025

Milestone reached on the seven day moving average highlights accelerating network growth and sets stage for a major difficulty adjustment.

Bitcoin’s hashrate has reached 1 zettahash per second (1 ZH/s) on a seven day moving average for the first time, setting a new all time high, according to Glassnode data.

The hashrate is the average estimated number of hashes per second produced by miners securing the network. Using a seven day moving average is important because it smooths out natural block time variability.

The network has briefly touched 1 zettahash several times this year, but this is the first time it has been sustained on the seven day moving average.

To put this in perspective, 1 zettahash equals 1,000 exa hashes (EH/s). Bitcoin first crossed the 1 EH/s threshold in 2016, and in 2025 the network’s hash rate has climbed from around 800 EH/s at the start of the year to 1 ZH/s today.

This rapid increase in computing power is expected to trigger a significant difficulty adjustment of over 7% in the next two days, which would mark the second largest upward adjustment of the year.

Difficulty adjustments occur roughly every two weeks and ensure that new blocks are added to the blockchain approximately every 10 minutes, regardless of how much total mining power is online. Following this change, difficulty will rise to 138.96 trillion (T).