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Bitcoin has a strangely quiet year in chain. After a wave of speculative flows in 2024, the network now moves with almost clockwork efficiency.
The average block size has contracted, daily fees are less than half of what they were in January, and the fee-to-reward ratio has fallen towards the last levels seen in the year before the Ordinal and Inscription booms.
The price, however, did not follow the same pace. She has been grinding on the side for weeks, fighting for hold on $110,000.
A look under the hood shows a network running cold even as its market tries to stay hot. Total daily fees have fallen from around 4.7 BTC in early January to just over 2 BTC this month, a 56% slide since the beginning of the year.
Every mobile media tells the same story. The 30- and 90-day EMAs have been shown since March, with only brief increases around isolated bursts of subscription activity.
The fee-to-reward ratio, a clean measure of how much of a miner’s income comes from users rather than subsidies, fell from 1.35% in Q1 to 0.78% over the past three months.
The report matters because it shows us how the security of Bitcoin is funded. When users pay higher fees, they effectively share in the cost of maintaining the network. When fees decrease, that charge goes back to the subsidy: the 3,125 BTC created with each block. With the block reward fixed, miners rely more on the BTC/USD exchange itself. At $110,000, the network remains profitable, but the correlation is obvious: a soft tape in the price now translates directly into pressure on the margins of miners.
The cradle of the chain has other consequences. The average block size has decreased by about 10% since Q1, to about 1.53 MB, while mempool congestion has almost disappeared, except for a few small blocks.
This is positive for traders. Cheaper and more predictable settlement shortens confirmation windows for exchanges, ETF creations, and market makers managing flows between venues. Individual users also see transactions that clear faster at a lower cost. In practice, Bitcoin’s base layer is like a low-latency settlement network rather than a crowded auction.
However, the same data also show a structural change.
The 30-day correlation between rates and price has been negative for most of the year. Historically, price increases tend to come with busier mempools as new users pile in. This cycle, liquidity seems to have moved elsewhere: aggregated, batched, or off-chain. This decoupling shows that the microstructure of the Bitcoin market has evolved. Activity that was once visible on the chain is now spread across exchanges and custodians, leaving the blockchain itself quieter, even as market capitalization expands.
This is a risky business for miners. The decline in fare volume we’ve seen since the beginning of the year, from about $576,000 a day in Q1 to about $410,000 now, shows that the buffer against falling prices is getting thinner. If Bitcoin falls below $100,000, revenues could compress sharply. That could turn the economy of the middle age into a higher bet on the spot price, especially while the contribution of the rate remains low.
However, there is an upside to this. The current state of the network is stable, predictable and inexpensive to use. Average fees remain low even at high throughput, which means that Bitcoin’s appeal as a settlement layer remains intact. If the market continues to consolidate near $110,000 without new rate spikes, it could mark a new equilibrium for Bitcoin, making it a rare asset that trades on an institutional scale, supported by an unusually efficient base layer.
The duration depends on the request. A resurgence in subscription-level traffic or other retail sales flow could push rate averages back toward their Q1 levels. For now, however, the blockchain is quiet. The mempool runs silently, the blocks are smaller, and the network is stable, while its price, at least for the moment, is everything.
