IREN Closes Gap with CleanSpark as Realized Bitcoin Hashrate Jumps 25% in April

Iris Energy (IREN) expanded its realized Bitcoin hashrate by 25% in April, positioning itself as a potential challenger for the No. 2 spot among publicly traded Bitcoin miners.

The Sydney-headquartered firm mined 579 BTC during the month, up 8.6% from March, despite one fewer day and a 10% decline in the network’s daily production benchmark. Average output per exahash fell from 0.59 BTC/day in March to 0.53 BTC/day in April, as rising network hashrate and stagnant transaction fees weighed on miner efficiency.

According to the company’s update, the increase in production implies a 25% boost in realized hashrate, from 29.29 EH/s in March to 36.6 EH/s in April, driven by the ramp-up of installed capacity, which reached 40 EH/s late in the month.

IREN said it remains on track to hit 50 EH/s by June. If achieved, that would make it the second-largest public miner by realized hashrate, trailing only MARA. CleanSpark, which has consistently held the No. 2 position behind MARA, may soon be overtaken as Iris accelerates deployment.

The expansion comes amid a difficult post-halving landscape, where rising network difficulty and lower block rewards are compressing miner margins. In response, companies like Riot and CleanSpark—once committed to holding all mined Bitcoin—have begun selling production to fund operations.

With the bleak mining economics, IREN itself also announced earlier this year that it would pause further hashrate expansion once it hit the previously set target of 50 EH/s. Other mining companies, including Riot and Bitfarm, have indicated similar moves to shift their growth focus to high-performance computing hosting.