Zetahash & the Underdogs: August’s Bitcoin Mining Shakeup

This article first appeared in Miner Weekly, BlocksBridge Consulting’s weekly newsletter curating the latest news in bitcoin mining and data analysis from TheEnergyMag. Subscribe to receive in your inbox once a week.

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Bitcoin mining has crossed a historic threshold: For the first time in the network’s 16-year history, the 14-day moving average hashrate surpassed 1 zetahash per second (ZH/s), cementing a symbolic leap in scale as the difficulty retarget at the block height 915264 is set to push mining difficulty beyond 140 trillion. This milestone comes after four halving cycles and more than a decade of exponential growth: from gigahash speeds in 2010 to terahash in 2011, petahash in 2013, exahash in 2016, and now zetahash in 2025. The milestone reflects the relentless industrialization of Bitcoin mining, even as margins remain under pressure.

Against this backdrop, August’s production updates, compiled by TheEnergyMag, show diverging dynamics between the largest operators and a cluster of smaller, second-tier miners. The biggest fleets, led by MARA (NASDAQ: MARA), IREN, CleanSpark (NASDAQ: CLSK) and Cango (NYSE: CANG), were mostly stable, with realized hashrates changing only slightly from July.