It is an essential part of bitcoin’s ecosystem that Bitcoin miners participate in. Participating in mempools helps to verify transactions and they get a reward when a transaction clears. Usually, the mempool is ‘free’ and transactions go through easily with low fees but there are times when the mempool fills up causing transactions fees to surge. This is what happened at March’s beginning.
Bitcoin transaction fees increase
The transaction fees for bitcoin were higher at the beginning of this month. This was due to transaction clustering within the mempool. When the mempool is full, there are too many transactions that can be confirmed. Consequently fees will go up as the transaction fee determines whether it was approved. Thus, transactions that had higher fees were first confirmed.
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Because the pool was full, the transaction fees for incoming transactions were higher. This is the fee that corresponds to the transaction’s size. Fees began to rise on March 1, and continued for the following two days. The average transaction fee per day has risen to $691,000.
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The volume was full by the 2nd day of March, when transaction fees rose to $1.3 million. However, the miners were able to complete all transactions within the mempool on the third day. The transaction fees for this clearing was high and the mempool was completely empty on the 3rd day. This cleared had also seen the fall in transaction fees.
Increased Miner Revenues
Bitcoin transaction fees did not represent the only thing that saw a rise in revenues. Daily revenues from miners for the same time frame had increased by 6 percent. This was due to the BTC price recovery over the last week, as hashrate had dropped once more in the same save day period.
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The transaction fees are still very low, even though they saw a considerable uptake in the last week. These fees have fallen to their lowest level in seven months, and they are not as high as the peak points of digital assets’ history.
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The average number of transactions per day was also higher than the week before by 3.04%. Average transactions increased 2.54% and daily fees jumped 99.81%. The only thing that fell was the hourly block count, which dropped slightly by 1.67%.
Featured image taken from Investopedia. Chart from TradingView.com