The Bitcoin mining difficulty continued to push through to new all-time highs in 2025 amid a turbulent year for the mining industry. The Bitcoin (BTC) network mining difficulty, the relative computing challenge of adding a new block to the decentralized blockchain ledger, fell slightly to 146.4 trillion on Thursday, in the first difficulty adjustment of 2026. “The next Bitcoin difficulty adjustment is estimated to take place on Jan 22, 2026, 04:08:12 AM UTC, increasing the Bitcoin mining difficulty from 146.47 T to 148.20 T,” according to CoinWarz. Average block times are 9.88 minutes at the time of this writing, slightly below the 10-minute target, which means the next difficulty adjustment will increase slightly to align better with the target block time. Read more
The outage was the second major network disruption in 2025, with both incidents requiring a block reorganization that rolled back some activity. The team behind Starknet, an Ethereum layer‑2 (L2) scaling network, released a post-mortem report outlining the root cause of the temporary mainnet downtime on Monday. The root cause of the mainnet downtime was a discrepancy in the network state between the blockifier execution layer and the proving layer that checks that the execution layer is processing transactions correctly, according to the report. The Starknet team explained: This incorrect execution never saw L1 finality thanks to Starknet’s proving layer,” the StarkNet team said, highlighting how the proving layer functioned properly by flagging the error and not committing the faulty transactions to the ledger. Read more