As the Bitcoin reward halving nears, mining difficulty has hit a record high. In the last adjustment before the halving, the difficulty reached 86.39 trillion.

Mining difficulty simply refers to the difficulty of adding new blocks to the Bitcoin blockchain. As the difficulty increases, so does the processing power required to produce Bitcoin. More processing power makes the Bitcoin network more secure. Increasing difficulty also means there is more demand for Bitcoin mining.

The difficulty automatically readjusts every 2016 blocks according to the state of the network. Increases in processing power result in a corresponding increase in difficulty. The next difficulty adjustment will take place 4 days after the halving, which is expected to take place on April 20th.

The halving, which occurs every 4 years, will reduce Bitcoin block rewards from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC. This will reduce the daily Bitcoin production from 900 BTC to 450 BTC. Therefore, there will be a significant reduction in the number of new BTC released.

The number one cryptocurrency by market capitalization is trading at $67,029 at the time of writing.