On Monday, the mining of a single block of bitcoin (BTC) took longer than an hour, which caused thousands of transactions to remain in an unconfirmed position.
The on-chain statistics from a number of different block explorers indicate that there was a time gap of 85 minutes between the two most recent blocks that were mined by Foundry USA and Luxor.
According to Mempool, prior to the mining of the most recent block, there were more than 13,000 transactions that were still in the pending state.
An increase in the difficulty of mining Bitcoin was implemented one week ago in order to maintain the regular interval of 10 minutes between block confirmations.
The mining difficulty has increased to 35.6 trillion, making it more expensive to mine bitcoin. This places additional strain on an industry that is already struggling to cope with rising energy prices and a bear market in cryptocurrencies.
At this time, it is unknown what caused the most recent confirmation of the block to be delayed.
 block took almost an hour, leaving thousands of transactions unresolved.){kind=link}