Bitcoin transactions fall to lowest since fall 2023

The number of transactions on the Bitcoin network has fallen to levels not seen in nearly 19 months, despite the BTC price remaining near all-time highs.

According to the analytical resource The Block, the average number of transactions per week has decreased to 317 thousand transactions per day, and on June 1, only 256 thousand transactions were registered - this is the lowest figure since October 2023. The decrease in activity led to miners starting to include transactions with very low fees in blocks, below the generally accepted threshold of 1 satoshi per byte. In particular, one transaction remained in the mempool (a pool of unconfirmed transactions) for almost a month and was added to a block with a fee of only $0.01, which caused discussion in the technical community.

There has been a debate within Bitcoin Core about these low-fee transactions. A group of 31 developers have published an open letter calling for such transactions not to be rejected if they find a place in the blocks decided by miners. In their view, censoring such transactions is contrary to the decentralized nature of Bitcoin and its principles of openness and resistance to filtering.

However, not all community members agree with this approach. Some experts point out that allowing transactions that are too cheap could encourage an increase in the volume of “spam” transactions, especially given the growing popularity of new blockchain data formats such as runes and ordinals. This, in turn, could reduce the efficiency of the network and worsen its performance.