The bitcoin mining difficulty level increased by 1.72% on Thursday, reaching a record high, while the network’s hash rate increased, indicating that miners are using more processing power. The difficulty level changes roughly every fortnight and is a measure of how much computing power it takes to mine blocks to get bitcoin rewards.

The mining difficulty level was 48.71 trillion at block height 786,240 on Thursday, after increasing by 2.23% during the previous adjustment on 6 April. The difficulty level has risen since 25 February during the last five adjustments.

Bitcoin’s hash rate, a measure of the computing power used by miners, was around 355.4 exahash per second on Wednesday, up from 338.3 exahash on April 6.

Bitcoin’s price has fallen 1.94% in the past 24 hours to $28,284 as of 11:30am in Hong Kong, down 7.83% over the past seven days. The largest coin by market capitalisation traded at around $28,100 on 6 April and has risen by more than 70 per cent over the year.

Bitcoin’s mining yield in the last 24 hours was US$0.0646 per terahash per second, down US$0.2 from a year ago.