Bitcoin network health

Block times to block 973,442

• Longest gap in the last 2,016 blocks: 68.68 min, before block 973,263; 5 gaps of an hour or more.
• Daily mean on 26 Oct 2026: 8.95 min; daily median 6.78 min. Block discovery is random, so most gaps are shorter than the mean and a few are much longer.

Times are the block headers' timestamps, which miners set and which may run up to about two hours off the true time, so single gaps can even be negative; averages over many blocks are reliable.

• Daily estimate on 26 Oct 2026: 1,132.1 EH/s; 7-day average 1,080.2 EH/s. Highest day in the past year: 1,241.4 EH/s on 26 Nov 2025.
• Difficulty now: 140.58 trillion, set at block 971,712 on 16 Oct 2026. A block takes about 603.78 sextillion hashes on average.
• Next adjustment at block 973,728 (286 blocks left): estimated +6.9% around 29 Oct 2026 (range +3.9% to +8.0%). Live estimate and every past adjustment: next difficulty adjustment.

Hash rate implied by recent blocks

Hash rate cannot be observed directly. Each block needs on average its difficulty times 2³² hashes, so the work of a run of blocks divided by the time they took estimates the hashes per second. Short windows swing widely because blocks are found at random.

• 45,058 transactions are waiting in our node's mempool, 14.95 MvB: about 15.0 blocks' worth. The lowest fee rate it accepts now is 0.1 sat/vB.
• Pending fees: 0.0836 BTC. The mempool uses 93 MB of the 300 MB our node allows it.
• The last 144 blocks (to 973,442) were 96.0% full by weight on average, and 1 was empty.

The next-block rate comes from our node's mempool, captured 2 min ago at block 973,442; the others are Bitcoin Core's economical estimates. What a transaction costs at each speed: Bitcoin fee estimator.

• 2 stale blocks in the 30 days to 26 Oct 2026, 0.4 per 1,000 blocks found.
• 12 stale blocks since our node finished its initial sync on 3 Apr 2026; the latest on 14 Oct 2026.

Days with a stale block, latest first

A stale block is a valid block that lost a race: another block at the same height became part of the chain everyone builds on, and the losing pool's reward vanished. Our node counts every such block it holds or saw, so the figure is a lower bound for the whole network. Frequent stale blocks would point to slow block propagation. Stale blocks chart.

• 9 empty blocks in the 30 days to 26 Oct 2026, 0.20% of the 4,554 blocks mined.
• 95 empty blocks in the past 365 days; the latest day with one was 23 Oct 2026.

An empty block carries only its coinbase transaction. Pools sometimes mine one right after a new block arrives, before they have checked which transactions the new block spent; it earns the subsidy but leaves waiting transactions behind. Empty blocks chart.

• Over the 30 days to 26 Oct 2026, the largest pool of each day mined 26.7% of its blocks on average, the three largest 63.3% and the five largest 79.9%.
• On 26 Oct 2026, 3 pools as tagged mined more than half of the day's blocks (2 counting the AntPool group as one).
• Concentration index (HHI, 0 to 10,000), 30-day average: 1,650 for pools as tagged, 2,255 with the AntPool group combined.

Pools are organisations, identified from the tags they write into their blocks' coinbase. The AntPool group combines pools that share its infrastructure. A pool is not a single miner: its hash rate comes from many independent miners who can switch pools. More: the mining pools guide.

• Reachable nodes in our IPv4 sample: 3,437 on average on 26 Oct 2026, 96.9% of them at the chain tip.
• Our own node, which every figure on this page comes from, runs Bitcoin Core 31.1.0: a full node keeping every block since 2009 (888 GB), fully synced to block 973,442.

Soft-fork signalling and block versions

Reachable nodes are a sample: the nodes our crawler reached over IPv4 that accept incoming connections, re-contacted twice an hour. Most nodes accept none, and nodes reachable only over Tor, I2P or IPv6 are not counted, so the true number of nodes is larger. Software names and versions are self-reported.