Bitcoin's mempool is a ghost town

Where have all the transactions gone?

Author

Colin Harper
July 02, 2025

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BTC $105K 4%

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CORZ $11.35 4.3%

Where did all the fees go?

Bitcoin’s mempool is quiet – way too quiet. 

In April, the largest bitcoin mining pool, Foundry, mined a block that included just 7 transactions. It was the emptiest non-empty block in more than two years. (An empty block occurs when a mining pool deliberately mines a block with no transactions).

The later half of 2024 and the first half of 2025 have been a stark departure from the go-go days of 2023 and the first half of 2024. Back then, Bitcoin’s mempool was frothy with activity thanks to metaprotocols like inscriptions, runes, and BRC-20 tokens, so much so that bitcoin miners hauled in record USD-denominated transaction fee flows on April 20, 2024.

It’s unusual for transaction fee activity to be this low in a bull market. According to CoinMetrics data, in 2021, bitcoin miners earned $2.8 million per day in fees on average. So far in 2025, that average is just $0.55 million. So what exactly is going on?

To explain Bitcoin’s fee drought, we have to look at three different trends: technical advancements, Bitcoin’s financialization, and metaprotocols. 

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Segwit adoption and Bitcoin’s financialization are primary culprits

To start with an obvious and easy explanation, the majority of the Bitcoin network is now using a transaction standard that is cheaper and more data efficient. 

SegWit was released in 2016, but it didn’t become a ubiquitous transaction standard until relatively recently. SegWit transactions are smaller and more data efficient than those that came before it, and as of 2023, 90%+ of all active wallets have adopted SegWit. 

It would stand to reason that, as SegWit has become increasingly adopted and transactions have become more efficient, we’d see this reflected in transaction fee revenue. But this only tells part of the story. 

For the rest, we have to look at institutional adoption. 

In a June 19 newsletter, Glassnode notes that Bitcoin’s integration into legacy finance, spurred forth by the January 2024 bitcoin ETF approvals, has recently manifested in two trends.

For the first, the value of average bitcoin transactions are increasing. The post notes that in June, 89% of transactions were settling value at or greater than $100,000, versus 66% in November 2022. 

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Where do you think bitcoin transaction fees will be this time next year?

-CMH