New records continue to be set in the bitcoin (BTC) ecosystem, which has seen the mining difficulty adjustment rise to a new all-time high of 110.45T (trillion). 110.45 trillion means that the difficulty is approximately 110.45 trillion times harder than it was at the time of Bitcoin’s genesis block.

The difficulty adjustment adjusts every 2,016 blocks and recalibrates to ensure that blocks are mined every 10 minutes on average.

This is now the eighth consecutive positive adjustment in difficulty, putting additional pressure on miners as the industry becomes cuter and harder to mine a block to receive bitcoin rewards.

This is one of the reasons why some of the listed miners have turned to high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI), since they could not survive by mining bitcoin alone. In addition, we have seen MARA Holdings (MARA) issue convertible bonds to buy bitcoin. On top of that, MARA optimizes revenue by lending out their bitcoin to achieve single-digit returns.

This is not the first time we have seen so many positive adjustments in a row. We have seen these types of records before, during the summer of 2021, shortly after the Chinese mining ban, when the hashrate dropped by around 50%.

Shortly after this event, from July to November 2021, the difficulty put in nine consecutive positive adjustments, with the last adjustment coinciding with the top of the bull market when bitcoin hit around $69,000. Bitcoin then entered a bear market throughout 2022. The last positive adjustment marked the 2021 peak.

However, the opposite happened in 2018, with bitcoin making 17 positive corrections from December 2017, which coincided with the peak of the bull market, when bitcoin was around $20,000. A small negative adjustment followed in July 2018, when the price was around $6,000.

The network then went on to make another six consecutive positive corrections before seeing more negative corrections around Q4 2018, when bitcoin bottomed out for the cycle at around $3,000.

No clear trend emerges when bitcoin makes so many consecutive positive adjustments, but it has shown near cycle tops and bottoms in the past. However, it is important to recognize the continued strength of the hash rate, on a 7-day moving average, is at 775 EH/s, with CoinDesk research suggesting that 1 zettahash per second can be reached before the next halving.