Bitcoin BTC/USD Mining difficulty hit an all-time high early Wednesday, although the asset’s price has seen a sharp drop to $20,309 at the time of writing.

What happened: On-chain data from BTC.com shows that the mining difficulties on the Bitcoin network have risen to a new high of 32.05 trillion.

Meanwhile, the average hashrate on the network was around 228.24 EH/s — a significantly high number, although it’s down from an all-time high of 231 EH/s.

The high hashrate and mining difficulty are useful indicators to examine the current state of the Bitcoin network.

Difficulty is the measure that increases or decreases with the hash rate on the bitcoin network at any given point in time. Difficulty adjustment is made to make BTC easier to mine when the hashrate is lower than required and increases to make BTC harder to mine when there is a large amount of hashrate.

In this scenario, the network indicators show that a large number of participants are still mining BTC despite the asset price drop, suggesting that mining could still be profitable for a number of BTC miners.

See also: IS BITCOIN A GOOD INVESTMENT?

Price promotion: At press time, BTC is trading at $20,309, down 6.9% over the past 24 hours, according to data from Gasoline Pro.