How Does a ‘Difficulty Adjustment’ Maintain a Consistent Block Time?

The difficulty adjustment is a mechanism in Proof-of-Work blockchains that periodically changes the mining difficulty target. If the average time to mine a block has been faster than the protocol's target time (e.g.

10 minutes for Bitcoin), the difficulty increases. If it has been slower, the difficulty decreases.

This ensures that regardless of fluctuations in the total network hashrate, the block generation rate remains relatively stable.