Bitcoin Hashrate Posts V-Shaped Recovery — Will Price Follow?

Bitcoin’s hashrate — a metric of the network’s total computational power — recorded a sharp V-shaped recovery in February after an extreme Arctic cold wave earlier in the year forced roughly 1.3 million mining machines offline. Freezing temperatures, heavy snowfall and surging heating demand strained the power grid, prompting energy-saving requests and localized blackouts; the disruption pushed hashrate down by about 30% and slowed block production.

By February, hashrate rebounded from below 850 EH/s to over 1 ZH/s, recovering nearly all of the prior drop. "Bitcoin mining just got ~15% harder, with the largest ever increase in absolute difficulty, completely erasing last epoch’s huge downwards adjustment," commented Mononaut, a developer at Mempool.

Despite the recovery, Bitcoin’s price remains under $70,000 while the estimated cost to mine one bitcoin in February sits around $84,000, suggesting many miners are still operating at a loss. V-shaped hashrate recoveries have often coincided with strong price rebounds.

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