On Monday, it took longer than an hour to mine a block of bitcoin (BTC), keeping thousands of transactions at a standstill until the process was completed.

2021 Highs

According to Colin Wu, at Bitcoin height 759053-054, the block time reached an unprecedented 85 minutes, much beyond the 10-minute threshold. This was close to the peak reached in 2021. 2021 saw a block time of 100 minutes due to China’s restriction on Bitcoin mining.

According to the image posted by Wu Blockchain, the time elapsed between the two most recent blocks at the time mined by Foundry USA and Luxor was 85 minutes. Mempool reports that more than 13 thousand transactions were waiting to be processed before the next block was mined.

No plausible cause yet

Last week, the Bitcoin network adjusted the difficulty so that block confirmations would continue to occur every 10 minutes. As Bitcoin’s mining difficulty increases to 35.6 trillion, the cost of mining the cryptocurrency is expected to soar, putting pressure on a market already struggling with rising energy costs and a crypto bear market.

Around 7:00 AM (UTC) on October 16, Bitcoin’s hashrate jumped to 264.5 Eh/s from 248.8 at 11 PM (UTC) the previous day. So the slowdown in mining block 759,054 was not due to a drop in hashrate. Throughout the first half of October, the hashrate plummeted as low as 240 Eh/s, with normal block time.

Bitcoin block times average 10 minutes, which affects how long cryptocurrency transfers take. In 2021, China mandated the end of Bitcoin mining as part of a stricter crackdown on cryptocurrencies.

Prior to the crackdown, China was rapidly becoming the center of the cryptocurrency business, fueling the growth of major crypto exchanges like Binance and the largest Bitcoin mining corporations. Beijing’s plans to ban cryptocurrency trade and mining were announced in 2021.