Over the week leading to the Ethereum Merge, Bitcoin on-chain activity was lit up like Christmas trees. The upgrade did not take place on bitcoin, but it had a significant impact on crypto activity, leading to an increase in activity across different networks. However, now that the Merge has been done and dusted, the network activity has begun to retrace to ‘normal’ levels, leading to a decline in on-chain activity.
Bitcoin Mining Hashrate Hashrate Has Dropped
The bitcoin mining difficulty has dropped for the first time since two months. The block production rate was low at 5.94 blocks per hour due to the 2.1% difficulty adjustment. The bitcoin hashrate reached an all-time high of 5.94 blocks per hour, just before the reversal.
Bitcoin miners, who had been seeing their revenue plummet over the past week, are pleased to see that the adjustment was not easy. In a seven-day span, the average transaction per block fell 1.55% from 1,786 and 1,759.
BTC Hash Rate Retraces from All-Time High | Source: Arcane Research
Bitcoin’s mining hash rate has now returned to early September levels, showing a retracement back to pre-Merge levels. Despite this increase in confidence from miners, the hash rate is still on the high end.
Increased Revenues
Since the bear market refused to rise, Bitcoin miners still feel the heat. With just over $17million in daily revenue, daily miner revenues are at their lowest point in the past year. Over a seven-day period, this accounted for a decrease of 4.04%.
The same downward trend was observed in fees realized daily, which fell 19.49% to $254199. Another 0.28% was lost in fees, bringing the total fees-related revenue to 1.48 percent.
Source: BTCUSD on TradingView.com| Source: BTCUSD on TradingView.com
However, last week saw the greatest declines in daily transaction volumes and average transaction values. With a decrease of 37.61% in average transaction values, the average transaction value fell to $12.304. The daily transactions volumes also dropped by 38.57% to $5.023 trillion from $3.085 million. It was the biggest drop in transaction volumes for the past week. The daily transactions were also lower at $254,696 than $250,755, which is a decline of 1.55%.
Bitcoin’s price has also followed this trend and has been struggling in the market. Although it was unable to gain $20,000 in the last cycle, Bitcoin is trading at its highest level since that peak. Understandably this level has been a significant support for bulls.
Featured Image from Bitcoinist. Charts from Arcane Research and TradingView.com.
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