In addition to combatting rising hashrate and difficulty, many of these miners had to curtail their operations in February in response to winter storms that threatened to snarl up energy infrastructure in the Western United States and Canada.

On February 1, Bitcoin’s 7-day average hashrate was 191 EH/s. By February 17, this would leap to 220 EH/s, a 15% increase which precipitated a 4.78% upward difficulty adjustment. Bitcoin miners were hashing under an all-time high difficulty for roughly half of the month, so they were earning fewer bitcoins per unit of hashrate.

With recent supply chain constraints and new power expansion delays among many of the public miners, though, there are no guarantees these companies will be able to achieve their promised hashrate expansion targets in 2022.