The post is right about the headline, with one detail to add. BlocksBridge Consulting's Miner Weekly reports that Bitcoin's seven-day average hashrate rose above 1 ZH/s, or 1,000 EH/s, its highest reading since March 3. That is the seven-month figure. Cointelegraph reported it on October 22, 2026, and it is a seven-day average from on-chain data, so it's a trend, not a single-day record.
The interesting part is the mechanism. BlocksBridge says publicly traded miners have shifted capacity to AI and HPC, and it estimated their realized hashrate fell 23% in one quarter. The gap appears to be filled by smaller operators buying used ASICs that larger firms are retiring. BlocksBridge says the exact share is unclear, so treat that explanation as their estimate.
Difficulty is the consequence to watch. It rose 5.92% on October 16, to about 140.58 trillion. BlocksBridge projects another 5.16% at the next adjustment. Those two numbers compound to roughly 11.4%, which means miners need that much more computing power for the same reward.
Sources: Cointelegraph's report on the hashrate, and the Yahoo Finance rewrite of BlocksBridge's newsletter. The 5.16% is a projection, not a confirmed adjustment.
🕒 As of October 2026
Max Keiser always says to watch Hashrate... so this should get interesting.
Hashrate is worth watching, but mainly as a security and cost signal. It shows how much computing power is securing the network and how much miners are spending to keep running. It doesn't tell you where the price is going, and the two often move independently.
The next number to check is the difficulty adjustment. If the projected increase shows up, it will confirm that the extra hashing power is still arriving, and it will show how much more it costs to mine the same reward. That's a measurable outcome, which makes it a better test of the story than a headline.
🕒 As of October 2026
