Data shows Bitcoin mining difficulty has increased, leading to a 14% drop in daily revenue for miners over the last week. The crypto bloodbath has also impacted their income.
Bitcoin Daily Mining Revenue Drops Below $40 Million, A 14% Drop Over The Last Week
As per the latest Arcane Research report, the Bitcoin mining difficulty saw yet another increase right before the last week.
While this difficulty increase of over 3% has contributed to the drop in miner revenues, another factor has been the crypto bloodbath of that week.
This “bloodbath” refers to the crash due to China’s announcement that crypto transactions are illegal in the country.
Here is a table showing all the relevant data relating to the drop in miner revenues during the week:
The BTC mining revenue change in the past week | Source: Arcane Research
As you can seen in the above table, Bitcoin daily miner revenues dropped almost 14% that week. They are now around $39 million, down more than $6 million over the period.
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These revenue levels are the lowest since the start of August. Transaction fees per day also dropped more than 17% during the week.
The 3% mining difficulty adjustment happened on 21 September and the Bitcoin block production rate is now around 6 blocks per hour.
BTC’s Crash Due To China’s Crypto Ban Impacts Mining Revenues
As already mentioned before, the increase in the difficulty wasn’t the sole factor behind the dip in Bitcoin miner revenues.
BTC’s price crashed $4k after China’s statement related to the crypto ban as the coin’s price went from $45k to $41k.
This decrease in the Bitcoin price and the mining difficulty, both, combined with the 17% decrease in transactions resulted in the plunge in the miner revenues.
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An interesting thing is that while the number of transactions has dropped by a lot, the average size of transactions has rather seen a 10% increase.
The Bitcoin lightening network has seen a big jump in activity during the period so it’s possible smaller transactions have moved over to it, while the big ones are still happening on-chain.
At the time of writing, Bitcoin’s price floats around 43.3$k, down 0.5% in the last seven days. Over the past month, the crypto has lost 9.6% in value.
The below chart shows the trend in the price of the coin over the last five days:
BTC's price keeps fluctuating wildly over the last few days | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView
Over the last few months, Bitcoin lost all volatility and trading volume as the network went relatively silent. But it has finally changed now as both the metrics seem to have made a return in their trend.