Data shows Foundry USA, the biggest Bitcoin mining pool in the world, has lost a significant portion of its Hashrate to the US winter storm.
Foundry USA Has Seen A Bitcoin Hashrate Decline Of 200 EH/s
The United States is currently experiencing an extreme weather event, with a powerful winter storm sweeping across much of the country. The Arctic air accompanying the storm has brought with it a severe drop in temperatures, causing widespread disruptions to travel and power infrastructure.
Thousands of flights have been canceled nationwide, while the strain on the power grid has left more than 800,000 homes without access to electricity, according to a report from the BBC. Amid all this chaos, the Bitcoin blockchain has also faced a noticeable blow; the cryptocurrency’s Hashrate has sharply gone down as American miners have curtailed power consumption to ease pressure on the grid.
A mining pool that has been significantly affected by the storm is Foundry USA. On Friday, the pool had a total computing power of around 340 exahashes per second (EH/s), while as of Monday, that figure has reduced to just 139 EH/s, according to data from MiningPoolStats.
Before the storm disruption, Foundry’s pool was the largest in the world by some distance, but after the Hashrate drop of almost 60%, its power has come in line with the second-largest Antpool. Due to Foundry being so big, its miners pulling back on power has had a real effect on the total network Hashrate, as data from CoinWarz shows.
Before the weekend, the Bitcoin Hashrate was floating around 1,118 EH/s, but on Sunday it dropped to a low of just 668 EH/s. The metric has seen a rebound on Monday, but its latest value of 776 EH/s is still down more than 30%. The result? The blockchain is processing each block in an average interval of 12.28 minutes, which is 2.28 minutes slower than the expected rate of 10 minutes.
While the storm has impaired Bitcoin for now, the network won’t take long to bounce back. Even in the scenario that Foundry USA’s downtime remains prolonged, BTC will correct for the absence of American miners in the next Difficulty adjustment. Satoshi Nakamoto programmed BTC so that the network always targets a block time of 10 minutes. If miners diverge from this rate, the network adjusts a metric known as the “Difficulty” just enough that miners get back to the desired speed.
Given the scale of the latest Hashrate drop, a sustained disruption would mean that the Bitcoin blockchain would be forced to ease up its Difficulty by a significant factor. Currently, the next network adjustment is estimated to reduce Difficulty by 18%.
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At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading around $87,700, down 5.7% in the last week.
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