Important facts:
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There has been a decline in general market activity over the past two months, which has impacted Bitcoin.
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At the peak of greatest demand, up to 500,000 transactions were recorded as waiting.
Transactions awaiting confirmation fell below the 100,000 mark for the first time since November 2023. This reduction in demand for block space has been gradual over the past two months and is related to the decline in operations driven by the Ordinals token and NFT market, a protocol that allows arbitrary information to be entered into the Bitcoin file.
According to data From mempool.space, today Less than 100,000 transactions were recorded in the mempool (or temporary memory of transactions awaiting confirmation). This fact is evident as during the last two months of the year (and most of 2023) this figure was in the range of 200,000 and 300,000 waiting transactions, with a peak of over 500,000 in December. This great activity was driven by the Ordinals token markets, which, on many occasions, provided a large portion of the profits of the network’s miners, bringing the value of commissions to tens of dollars.
To give you an idea of the magnitude of these numbers, on average a Bitcoin block stores 2,500 transactions. In a day, the Bitcoin network processes more than 300,000 transactions.
This decrease in the number of transactions reflects the low demand for the use of Bitcoin today, which has an impact on the value of commissions and miners’ income for this concept. As Cryptonoticias reported, the value of commissions has fallen since the start of February, so the question arises How much can the industry rely on this income? To maintain the profitability of operations after miners’ rewards are reduced by half.
especially, commissions Payments for each block of transactions represented between 1 BTC and 5 BTC in December, at a time of greatest network demand, when the mempool stored more than 400,000 transactions. Now, the range of commission income paid on each block is in the range of 0.1 BTC and 0.2 BTC. In terms of daily commission income, Miners will enter between 10 BTC and 100 BTC less each day. At the current BTC price this is a difference of millions of dollars.
However, miners’ unrealized profits have not diminished in this time, as the price of BTC when calculated in dollars is providing the support needed for those values to remain in the green. In fact, just a few days ago, miners reported record daily profits of more than $67 million, CryptoNoticias reported.
