Though headlines about bitcoin this year have focused on the challenges facing the cryptocurrency, it’s still booming with some of the highest mining and transaction rates in its history, according to recent statistics.

The digital currency has yet to find the “killer app” that would make it an essential part of the average consumer’s Internet toolkit. Several bitcoin-related services shut down in recent months, some amid allegations of fraud, which only highlighted the continued risks that deals tied to the currency can pose for casual investors. As a result, some companies are building alternative networks based on the technology behind bitcoin.

But the bitcoin network’s hash rate—a measurement of the amount of computing power being devoted to mining the currency—reached an all-time high this month, and the week ending Tuesday saw the most bitcoin transactions of any seven-day period since bitcoin’s inception, according to statistics from the bitcoin data service Kaiko.

Each of those transactions is automatically disseminated to the global bitcoin network and recorded by bitcoin miners to a shared transaction ledger known as the blockchain. Miners use specialized, high-powered servers to group new transactions into sets called blocks that meet certain mathematical specifications when looked at in combination with blocks that have previously been formed.

For that, they’re rewarded with newly created bitcoin, plus small transaction fees, for each mathematically valid block added to the transaction chain. In order to keep new bitcoin flowing at a steady rate, the network automatically adjusts the range of values of a mathematical hash function that valid blocks can produce as the amount of computing power devoted to mining increases or decreases.

At present, the global network of miners computes about 700 quadrillion hashes, or 700 petahashes, per second. Valery Vavilov, the CEO of bitcoin mining technology company BitFury, predicted in an email to Fast Company the network will soon enter the “exahash era,” computing more than one quintillion hashes every second, thanks in part to new speedier mining chips it’s set to release early next year.

While BitFury conducts its own mining operations on a grand scale—the company just opened a massive new data center in Tbilisi, Georgia, last week that Vavilov says will on its own ultimately transform 40 megawatts of power into between 400 and 650 petahash—it also offers its chips for sale to other miners. For while controlling more mining capacity generally means more blocks added to the chain and more bitcoin revenue, the bitcoin community is inherently fearful of any one organization controlling more than half of the world’s mining capacity.