The difficulty of mining Bitcoin has been steadily climbing for some time now, as more and more miners compete with one another to be the one to mine the next block on the Bitcoin blockchain successfully.

With the weather now clearing up in Texas, the world’s Bitcoin mining stronghold, miners are coming back online to double down on their operations. This time around, this has pushed the mining hash rate to a new all-time high.

Hash Rate Reaches All-Time High

Over the weekend, the mining hash rate reached a new all-time high. According to info from Hashrate Index backed by data from Ycharts, Bitcoin’s hash rate spiked to 465 EH/s on Saturday from 406 EH/s on the previous day.

Specifically, the 7-day average hash rate hit 401 EH/s on Saturday, while the 3-day average has risen a more staggering 18% to 448 EH/s. Although the hash rate has now dropped to 425 EH/s at the time of writing, it is still at its highest levels and up more than 119.1% from one year ago. 

The increase in the hash rate has naturally led to an increase in the block production rate. Over the last couple of months, BTC miners had been targeting a block production rate of 6 per hour, now, a block is produced at an average time of 9 minutes and 15 seconds.

BTC price recovers above $30,600 | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView.com

Bitcoin Mining Revenue Hits $184 Million In Q2

Bitcoin has seen a flurry of increase in transaction volumes this year, as the cryptocurrency continues to dominate the industry. In the past 24 hours alone, the total volume of bitcoin traded increased by 30.37%. 

According to a report by published by Coin Metrics on July 5, BTC miners generated a remarkable revenue of $2.4 billion during the second quarter of 2023. Out of this amount, $184 million came from transaction fees alone, representing more than the five preceding quarters combined. 

This increase in transaction fee revenue is traced to the increase in transaction volume after BRC-20 tokens were introduced on the Bitcoin blockchain. The BRC-20 came in as a token standard to allow the creation and transfer facilities of fungible tokens on the blockchain through the use of ordinal inscriptions.

Bitcoin miners have also experienced favorable macroeconomic conditions in the last quarter, including lower electricity rates for miners based in the United States. On the other hand, Bitcoin mining has been growing in the Middle East, with the UAE leading the charge. Miners in the UAE now produce approximately 13 EH/s, accounting for almost 4% of the total hash rate. 

As for Bitcoin, the price of the cryptocurrency has been ranging in the $30,000 mark since late June.

Featured image from iStock, chart from TradingView.com

The Bitcoin price is regaining bullish momentum over today’s trading session, retracing the losses seen early in the week. Once again, the cryptocurrency is under the influence of macroeconomic forces working in its favor for the first time in months.

At the time of writing, the Bitcoin price trades at $21,000 with a 4% profit in the last 24 hours and seven days, respectively. Other cryptocurrencies in the crypto top 10 are displaying similar strength, with Binance Coin (BNB) and Dogecoin (DOGE) leading the altcoin rally.

Bitcoin Price Barrels Through Resistance Levels

Data from Material Indicators show a spike in buying pressure from investors with orders of about $100,000. These Bitcoin whales are positively reacting to today’s U.S. economic data, which signals a slowdown in this country’s job market. An analyst at Material Indicator said:

Unemployment came in at 3.7% which is 0.2% higher than forecasted and BTC whales see it as a sign that FED rate hikes may be working. Note, that one month’s report doesn’t make a trend, but right or wrong, this market reacts to every data point.

As reported by NewsBTC, the U.S. Federal Reserve (Fed) is trying to mitigate inflation in the dollar. The financial institution is implementing a monetary tightening program by hiking interest rates and reducing its balance sheet.

For the first time in months, the Fed plans seem to be working, or at least, the data hints at this possibility. Ironically, adverse reports favor the Bitcoin price and risk-on assets in the current economic scenario. Another analyst said the following about the recent price action:

Unemployment is rising which is what the FED wants. Markets reacting positively to bad news which is good news. It’s sad that we are at the point where they want people to lose their jobs to fix inflation.

In addition to economic data, the U.S. dollar is trending to the downside and could re-test previous support after months in an upside trend. This downside price action is contributing to the Bitcoin price upside momentum.

The hourly $DXY chart shows a confirmed fakeout earlier in the session.

Still clinging to 111.80 for now, though. pic.twitter.com/ZSYvJocjHi

— Justin Bennett (@JustinBennettFX) November 4, 2022 

Bitcoin’s price has momentarily surpassed $44,000, extending its impressive streak of roughly $7,000 gains over the last week.

Bitcoin has steadily increased after weeks of difficulty, approaching the $45,000 mark – a 1% increase in the last 24 hours and a nearly 20% increase in the last 30 days, Coingecko charts show.

According to CoinMarketCap data, the world’s largest digital cryptocurrency was recently priced above $45,000 on February 10.

Bitcoin is exhibiting a trend that indicates it may sustain its recent gains. According to Bloomberg Markets’ crypto monitoring, a so-called triangle shape on Bitcoin’s price chart is compressing tighter and the cryptocurrency is poking at the triangle’s upper end.

Related Reading | Bitcoin Almost Hits $44,000 With Terra $125 Million BTC Purchase Tempo Up

Bitcoin On A Steady Upward Momentum

Bitcoin’s price has been steadily rising over the last week, spearheading a crypto market resurgence that has seen Cardano (ADA), Ethereum (ETH), and Solana (SOL) all increase by more than 10%.

Taken together, the increases have pushed the total cryptocurrency market back beyond $2 trillion.

BTC total market cap at $844.15 billion on the weekend chart | Source: TradingView.com

After breaking through the $40,000 barrier last week, bitcoin has maintained its gains and is now trading at the top confines of the $$44,000 zone it has been trading within since the start of the year.

As this unfolds, the US stock market is up today, as is cryptocurrency. The S&P 500 index is expected to gain 1.4% on a weekly basis, while the Nasdaq is expected to gain approximately 2%. Bitcoin has increased by approximately 6% in the last week.

Related Reading | Bitcoin Breaks Past The $40,000 Barrier Again – Can It Sustain The Momentum?

Can The ‘Digital Gold’ Hold Ground?

Bitcoin has long been referred to by some pundits as “digital gold” — a safe-haven asset that will remain stable when all other investments falter.

Bitcoin has only dipped below its four-year moving average a few times in its history, and even then only briefly, which means that the record price set four years ago is now considered the absolute bottom by some crypto analysts.

When Bitcoin does well, the rest of the market typically (but not always) follows suit. It’s been a good week, owing in part to a landmark Wall Street announcement: Goldman Sachs became the first major US bank to conduct a crypto transaction on Tuesday.

By purchasing an OTC Bitcoin non-deliverable option (NDO) from Galaxy Digital, the New York-based investment bank completed an over-the-counter (OTC) transaction.

According to others, this has resulted in an increase in investor confidence, as investors view the large sums of money and interest from established players as a cause to get involved and invest in crypto.

Featured image from TIME, chart from TradingView.com

Anyone paying attention to Bitcoin in the past months will notice a subtle, but importance change in its fundamentals. As BTC’s price made its way back to May’s high, just before the first capitulation event, there was an uptick in on-chain activity.

Related Reading | On-Chain Data Shows Bitcoin Miners Hold Off On Selling Despite BTC Rallying Above $57k

Unlike the sell-off period that occurred from May to end of July 2021, there was an increase in Bitcoin transactions. This rise led to an increment in network fees, as shown by explorer Mempool.space.

At the time of writing, a high priority Bitcoin transaction needs to pay a 20 sat/vB to be included in the blockchain, one of the highest fees in the past month. Conversely, BTC trades at $57,632 with a 19.3% profit in the daily chart.

Although the Bitcoin network is still far from the levels of activity experienced during its price peaked, the uptick is significant and could point towards a sustain rally by end of 2021.

According to a recent report by Glassnode, the boost in network activity suggest fresh demand for Bitcoin could arrive to the market in Q4. The research firm records a 19% grown in individual participants on-chain during the past 7-days.

Related Reading | TA: Bitcoin Lacks Momentum Above $56K, Why Rally Isn’t Over Yet

This metric stands at 291,000 active entities per day. Glassnode noted the following on what this could mean for BTC:

This value is on par with counts from late 2020 at the beginning of the last bull run. More active market participants has historically correlated with growing interest in the asset during early stage bull markets.

In addition, there has been an increase in the median transaction size during September. This metric stands at over 1.3 BTC, the research firm claimed.

A surge in the median transaction size doesn’t necessarily implies a continuation of the current rally, but suggest more institutions are coming into the market, Glassnode added:

Generally speaking, periods near the end of bear markets are when smart money start to accumulate in size. These periods are often characterised by lower (but rising) on-chain activity and increasingly large transaction sizes.

Bitcoin To Enter Bullish Phase?

Additional data provided by Glassnode notes an increase in some important metrics. For example, the Bitcoin Percent Supply in profit for the past week reached a 4-month high.

The transaction volume in the BTC Perpetual Futures Contract reached a 3-month high of $281,278,010 on crypto exchange Bitfinex. This suggest that the derivatives market is also starting to heat up and could once again become an obstacle for the BTC bulls.

Related Reading | Why The $1 Trillion Coin Is Another Reason To Stay Long Bitcoin

However, the Transfer Volume as a percentage of the Realized Cap, a metric used to compare on-chain activity with the “value stored” in Bitcoin, recently rose above 3%. As Glassnode indicated, this suggest BTC could be about to enterer a bullish market phase.

Transfer Volume has once again broken above the 3% threshold suggesting growing demand for on-chain settlement of value. This is a bullish a development worth watching in the coming weeks based on its high historical signal.

Over the past month, the crypto market has looked like a rising tide for all coins from Bitcoin to Cardano — but data suggest growth across the asset class hasn’t been equal.

Last week, Bitcoin (BTC-USD) breached $50,000 for the second time in two weeks, extending a rally that put a grim sell-off that started in May further in the rear-view mirror. While notable for its volatility, gains in the largest cryptocurrency may have gotten lost in the swell of rising prices across the entire asset class.

With a majority of decentralized finance and non-fungible token (NFT) trading happening on the Ethereum (ETH-USD) blockchain, the second largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization rose by a third from $2,700 to $3,900, a growth rate 17 percent higher than BTC.

And other blockchain-based currencies such as the third highest valued cryptocurrency, Cardano (ADA-USD) has more than doubled while a newer one, Solana (SOL-USD), has more than tripled in value over the past month. ADA and SOL have continued to notch almost daily all time highs for the past two weeks.

In fact, new data released on Tuesday from Solana, Dogecoin and Cardano were the fastest-growing cryptos this year. All three posted four-digit increases to their market capitalization, with Solana’s surging by 8,616%, and Dogecoin (DOGE-USD) and Cardano following with a 4,351% and 1,499% jump, respectively.

Bitcoin IRA, an investment platform that helps retail investors gain crypto exposure in their retirement accounts, saw “record-breaking inflows” of new accounts over the previous month.

“We broke our record in the first quarter right before Bitcoin ran from $45,000 to $65,000,” the company’s Chief Operating Officer, Chris Kline told Yahoo Finance. “We’re seeing the same pattern happen again. So this past month [August] felt a lot like April, but about twice as big.”

The search for growth

Currently, Bitcoin IRA has close to 120,000 client accounts, with approximately $2 billion in assets on the platform. Although the platform’s heft doesn’t move the market, the swell of retail investors opening new accounts — especially for tax-advantaged IRA accounts — is an indicator of how curious investors are as they seek more traditional ways to participate in this market.

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By rough approximation across all accounts, Kline said his clients hold 43% of their portfolio in bitcoin, 27% in ethereum, and the remaining 30 percent in a mix of other cryptocurrencies. The company offers 10 different cryptocurrencies in total, and is planning to more than double its crypto offerings in the fall.

Back in early May when Ethereum started rising to its all-time high above $4,000, the company saw a large influx of swaps or pairing from BTC to ETH. It signaled many of his clients were shifting their portfolios from BTC to ETH. 

However, in recent weeks? “Not so much this time,” Kline told Yahoo Finance. 

To be sure, there could be a lag. “Retail buyers are looking for percentage growth. While bitcoin reigns supreme, it has relatively stable growth while there is exponential growth happening on ethereum. That’s what really gets their attention,” Kline explained.

Bitcoin’s August peak at $50K served as a “key technical and psychological level,” according to Will Clemente, an analyst at crypto mining and hardware broker Blockware Solutions.

Clemente told Yahoo Finance that for the last seven days, bitcoin’s price has remained in what he called a “volatility squeeze.” The idea being that buyers and sellers have balanced each other out, thereby reducing the asset’s typically high volatility.

But the analyst suggested that could be about to change. A volatility squeeze for bitcoin usually takes a week to two weeks to resolve.

“That’s not telling you the direction, it’s just telling you that there’s going to be a big move soon,” said Clemente.

Analyzing price action alone remains a dominant, more contested method for predicting buyers and sellers around a cryptocurrency. But Clemente’s specialization, on-chain analysis, has quickly become a crucial tool kit of metrics for investors hoping to glean some clarity into the nascent asset-class.

Similar to technical analysis, the on-chain technique tries to forecast future moves based on supply and demand. However, it relies on a far larger quantity of data only available for assets operating on publicly available blockchains.

While Clemente cannot predict the price shift of Bitcoin, he pointed to a handful of supply shock ratios, such as the movement of coin supply from speculators to long term holders and the exchange supply ratio, which shows the number of Bitcoins available to buy on exchanges relative to the overall circulating supply. 

Each of these metrics continue to rise higher after Bitcoin crested above $50,000, according to Clemente. Historically, supply shocks begin before the Bitcoin price moves upward.

David Hollerith covers cryptocurrency for Yahoo Finance. Follow him @dshollers.

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