Bitcoin’s 7D Hashrate Hits 1 ZH/s Milestone as Fees Slide to Multi-Year Lows

Bitcoin’s computing power has reached an unprecedented level, crossing the 1 zetahash per second (ZH/s) mark on a seven-day moving average basis over the weekend.

The milestone underscores the network’s continued growth and resilience but comes at a time when miners are seeing profitability squeezed by rising difficulty and declining transaction fee income.

According to network data, the surge in hashrate is set to trigger a difficulty adjustment of more than 7% in the next two days, further raising the computational threshold required to mine new blocks. Difficulty has already been at record levels throughout the summer as capacity returned to the network following curtailments during peak power demand months.

The jump in network strength coincides with one of the weakest periods for fee revenue in recent memory. In August, transaction fees made up less than 0.8% of total block rewards, the lowest share in years.

The drop comes despite bitcoin trading at around $110,000 and miners working within the current 3.125 BTC per block epoch. By comparison, fee revenue has occasionally spiked to account for more than 10% of rewards during periods of heightened demand for blockspace.

These dynamics have sharply reduced miners’ daily production benchmarks. At current levels, one exahash of computing power earns about 0.49 BTC per day. Before the April 2024 halving, which cut block subsidies from 6.25 to 3.125 BTC, the benchmark stood at roughly 1.44 BTC per exahash per day.

With fee income subdued and bitcoin’s spot price recently slipping back below $120,000, miner revenue metrics have deteriorated further. Hashprice has fallen back below $55 per petahash per second (PH/s), erasing gains miners had briefly seen earlier in the quarter.