Bitcoin mining hashrate has been more distributed among mining pools, according to a report from cryptocurrency research firm Diar released on March 13.

As per the report, smaller mining pools have made significant gains in the past few months as a result of unknown miners either drop off or change pools.

Unknown bitcoin miners had gone from solving only 6% of the blocks at the start of 2018 to a whopping 22% by the end of the year.

However, the upward trend has been bucked as smaller pools have been making gains since entering 2019, the past two months saw smaller pools solve 23-24% of bitcoin blocks, which doubles its average of last year.

The China-based crypto mining giant Bitmain (with BTC.com, AntPool and ViaBTC included) has lost a chunk of bitcoin hashrate, seeing its hash power fall to 36% in the previous two months from its alarming highs – over 50% the same period last year which once triggered concerns that Bitmain might stage a 51% attack.

As the bitcoin hashrate continues in steady growth nearing highs, climbing to the level of last November, Diar explains that such distribution has its advantages,

“While the distribution of hash power is certainly better geared against coordinated attacks, the number of pools continue to dwindle. To date, versus the start of 2018, 40% of the pools have now shut down.”

As previously reported by 8btc, Bitmain has phased out at least 100,000 old mining machines for new hardware update and been selling its hashrate to cloud mining platform BitDeer, which helps to promote the hashrate decentralization among mining pools.