Bitcoin’s 30-day simple moving average hashrate stood at 977 EH/s in Luxor’s Hashrate Index roundup published on April 13, 2026. The same roundup said the 7-day SMA rose from 957 EH/s to 969 EH/s over the week of April 6-13, 2026, while the 30-day SMA stood at 977 EH/s. That level was below earlier 2026 peaks, not a new all-time high.
Hashrate remains high, but below earlier 2026 levels
The 977 EH/s figure is best described as a high 30-day average and a rebound from shorter-term weakness in early April, not as a current record. Hashrate Index’s April 13 roundup said network hashrate rose 1.3% week over week, while difficulty had last adjusted on April 3, increasing 3.87% to 138.97T. The roundup also estimated a 3.66% downward difficulty adjustment expected around April 17, showing that the network was still recalibrating after earlier volatility.
The chronology also needs adjustment. Bitcoin had already crossed the 1 zettahash per second, or 1,000 EH/s, range before the April 13 reading. Hashrate Index showed 7-day and 30-day SMAs above 1 ZH/s in January 2026, including a 7-day SMA of 1,054 EH/s and 30-day SMA of 1,052 EH/s in the January 12 roundup. On March 2, Hashrate Index again showed a 7-day SMA of 1,068 EH/s and a 30-day SMA of 1,035 EH/s. The April 13 reading therefore reflects a lower, but still elevated, level relative to those earlier 2026 snapshots.
Bitcoin’s block subsidy context is accurate. Since the April 2024 halving, the base block reward has been 3.125 BTC before transaction fees. A rising hashrate under that subsidy structure increases competition among miners for the same protocol issuance, although miner economics still depend on bitcoin price, transaction fees, power costs, fleet efficiency, curtailment revenue and corporate hedging strategies.
Miner fleet expansion and difficulty pressure
Riot said in its April 2, 2026 Q1 operations update that its deployed hash rate reached 42.5 EH/s as of quarter-end, up 26% from 33.7 EH/s a year earlier, while its average operating hash rate rose to 36.4 EH/s, up 23% year over year. Riot’s Form 10-Q also said it continued deploying miners during Q1 2026 and had increased total deployed hash rate capacity from 38.5 EH/s at December 31, 2025 to 42.5 EH/s at March 31, 2026.
CleanSpark said in its May 6, 2026 April operational update that, for the month ended April 30, 2026, it had 50.0 EH/s of operational hashrate, 46.2 EH/s of average operating hashrate, 224,473 miners in its deployed fleet and 16.07 J/TH peak fleet efficiency. Those figures support a narrower claim that large public miners continued to operate expanded, efficient fleets; they do not prove that Riot and CleanSpark alone drove the network-wide hashrate increase.
The difficulty mechanism should be described as protocol-level calibration rather than a discretionary market response. Bitcoin difficulty adjusts every 2,016 blocks, roughly every two weeks, so that the average time between blocks remains around 10 minutes. As more hashpower joins, difficulty can increase at the next retarget; if hashpower falls or block times slow, the adjustment can move downward.
Ethereum no longer uses proof-of-work mining, and transaction throughput records on Ethereum are not operationally comparable to Bitcoin’s SHA-256 hashrate or mining difficulty. The confirmed picture is narrower: Bitcoin’s hashrate remained elevated in April 2026, the 977 EH/s 30-day SMA was below earlier 2026 30-day readings, and public-miner disclosures from Riot and CleanSpark show continued large-scale fleet capacity during the same period.