[May 2026]Mempool empty, Consolidate your small inputs @0.66 sat/vbyte

[NotATether]

The mean transaction volume is almost the same, so there’s no collapse, although some spikes are visible during 2024–2026.

~

So in my view, this shows that the main factor influencing the daily transaction count is the fixed blockspace rather than the fee level. During periods of high fees some transactions remained in the mempool for many days before being confirmed. Now there is almost no congestion.

Nice, so it means the fractional sat fees really helped incentivice people to spend less on their transactions.

I expect the chart would be different thing it it exclude ordinals, runes and other TX that only add arbitrary data.

Which leads me to the question, how many txes per year are we seeing with ordinals? At least in 2025 or in the past 12 months.

[LoyceV]

I have been wondering... these low fees are great, but is the transaction volume the same, or much lower than when we had high fees?

Look at Mempool Goggles, click "Data". About 60% of the next block is just data spam. About a year ago, I've seen 80% or even higher. Most blocks are still completely full, so Bitcoin is at it's maximum capacity, but I don't think many people use it for actual payments.

Which leads me to the question, how many txes per year are we seeing with ordinals? At least in 2025 or in the past 12 months.

Let's look at block 947756: 5458 transactions, and the very large majority of them are "Runestone". I checked a few more recent blocks, and I think 3000 "ordinal" transactions per block is a conservative estimate. Let's say it's half a million per day, say 100-250 million in a year. And for what? Just because someone convinced someone else to throw money at it to make the creator very, very rich?

[joker_josue]

I have been wondering... these low fees are great, but is the transaction volume the same, or much lower than when we had high fees?

Look at Mempool Goggles, click "Data". About 60% of the next block is just data spam. About a year ago, I've seen 80% or even higher. Most blocks are still completely full, so Bitcoin is at it's maximum capacity, but I don't think many people use it for actual payments.

Which leads me to the question, how many txes per year are we seeing with ordinals? At least in 2025 or in the past 12 months.

Let's look at block 947756: 5458 transactions, and the very large majority of them are "Runestone". I checked a few more recent blocks, and I think 3000 "ordinal" transactions per block is a conservative estimate. Let's say it's half a million per day, say 100-250 million in a year. And for what? Just because someone convinced someone else to throw money at it to make the creator very, very rich?

They spend BTC on those things, but if you tell them to use BTC to buy personal goods, for everyday use, they say no because that's wasting BTC since it will be worth more tomorrow.

How are we supposed to understand the minds of these people? It's complicated.

[LoyceV]

They spend BTC on those things, but if you tell them to use BTC to buy personal goods, for everyday use, they say no because that's wasting BTC since it will be worth more tomorrow.

Someone made them believe their ordinal crap will go up in price faster. Remember NFTs? Yeah, me neither

[LoyceV]

Most blocks are now full with transactions paying 1 sat/vbyte or more, but once in a while there's some space left for lower fees. It's good to see the competition is now working under 1 sat/vbyte too: fees are slowly rising, without increasing a lot. This block had transactions paying 0.28 sat/vbyte, and about 5 blocks into the future fees will still be 0.25 sat/vbyte.

A month later, fees under 1 sat/vbyte have reached around 0.65 sat/vbyte. Fees have been steadily climbing.