What is hashrate?

Hashrate is the number of hash calculations performed each second by a mining machine or by every miner on a network combined. In proof of work mining, each calculation is one guess at a valid block, so hashrate is a measure of computing power.

What is hashrate in crypto mining?

Proof of work miners repeatedly run block data through a hash function, changing a small number each time, until the output falls below a target set by the network. Each attempt is one hash. The process is explained in how bitcoin mining works.

For bitcoin, the Bitcoin Wiki defines one hash as a double run of the SHA-256 function. A single machine's hashrate tells you how many attempts it makes per second, and its share of the network total is roughly its share of the blocks it can expect to find over time. That is why purpose-built ASIC miners, which make far more attempts per second than ordinary computers, dominate bitcoin mining.

Hashrates for different coins are not directly comparable when the coins use different algorithms, because one hash of each is a different amount of work.

What is hashrate measured in?

Hashrate is measured in hashes per second (H/s), with standard metric prefixes from NIST for large numbers:

• kH/s is a thousand hashes per second.
• MH/s is a million.
• GH/s is a billion.
• TH/s is a trillion.
• PH/s is a quadrillion (10 to the power of 15).
• EH/s is a quintillion (10 to the power of 18).
• ZH/s is 10 to the power of 21, or 1,000 EH/s.

The scale has grown enormously. The Bitcoin Wiki notes the whole network ran at about 300 PH/s in January 2015. Bitcoin.com News reported a network hashrate of about 1,025 EH/s on October 16, 2026, after it had topped 1 ZH/s during a recent recovery. These figures move constantly, so treat them as a snapshot as of October 2026.

How is bitcoin hashrate estimated?

Miners do not report their output to the network, so hashrate is inferred. Bitcoin adjusts its difficulty every 2,016 blocks to keep blocks coming about every 10 minutes. If you know the difficulty and how fast blocks are arriving, you can work backward to how many hashes must have been made. The Bitcoin Wiki gives a simple formula: average hashrate over the last 2,016 blocks is roughly difficulty multiplied by 2 to the power of 32, divided by 600.

Because block discovery is random, short-term estimates are noisy. A lucky run of fast blocks can make hashrate look higher for a day than it really is, so estimates over longer periods are more reliable.

What does hashrate mean for security?

The Bitcoin developer guide explains that rewriting a block takes roughly as much hashing as the network has done since that block was created. A higher total hashrate therefore raises the cost of a 51 percent attack. The money that pays for this computing power is covered in bitcoin's security budget.