AntPool Mines Bitcoin (BTC) Block With 11,255 Transactions, 984 Short of Record

Block 974961 Falls 984 Short

A single Bitcoin (BTC) block absorbed 11,255 transactions on Saturday, the second-highest single-block total in the network's history and 984 short of a record that has stood since 2015. AntPool, one of the largest pools in Bitcoin mining, produced block 974961 at 18:24:12 UTC. The roughly 1.1 MB block weighed 3,993,844 weight units, about 99.85% of the 4 million WU ceiling, where weight units measure a block's transaction data under the protocol's consensus rules. The count includes the coinbase reward, so it is not a clean measure of user-to-user transfers. It also packed 11,794 inputs and 23,122 outputs, the signature of many compact transfers rather than a handful of large value moves. SoChain's classification puts 95% of the block's activity under Bitcoin Runes and just 4% under payments, meaning the count reflects token minting activity, not payment demand. Fees told a thinner story: the whole block paid its miner 0.00240533 Bitcoin (BTC), a rounding error beside the 3.125 BTC subsidy. Mempool.space developer Mononaut had flagged the previous marker only three days earlier, when block 974557 carried 10,573 transactions, at that point the second-highest total on record. That ranking lasted three days. In a post flagging the new runner-up block, Mononaut wrote that the network was “quickly approaching” the all-time high of 12,239 transactions set in block 367853. Nearly all of the traffic paid under 1 sat/vB, meaning one satoshi, Bitcoin's smallest unit, per virtual byte of block space. About 10,585 transactions paid that rate and consumed 87.7% of the block's available space. The milestone landed on the Bitcoin network amid the softer Bitcoin price backdrop that followed the late-October Binance security incident, although daily counts rebounded to 591,830 on Saturday.

@mononautical · X post

A post flagging the new runner-up block.

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Why the 2015 Record Still Stands

The benchmark still standing dates to August 1, 2015, when F2pool mined block 367853 and packed 12,239 transactions into roughly 999.96 kilobytes under the era's 1 MB size cap, the all-time high Mononaut's post referenced. That block was not a payments surge either. It grew out of a wave of dust outputs that had piled up across the unspent transaction set, the record of spendable coins every full node must track to validate spending and reject double spends. F2pool consolidated thousands of tiny, low-value entries, some as small as about 62 bytes, and produced block 367851 the same day with 9,647 transactions. The episode rekindled a broader argument over network efficiency and block-space limits that ran for years afterward. Solo luck still beats fee engineering: two solo miners recently won block rewards worth $476,000 hours apart on CKPool. Modern records are built differently. The 2017 Segregated Witness (SegWit) upgrade introduced block weight, counting signature data at a discount, which is why two equal-size blocks on the Bitcoin network can hold very different transaction counts. It also explains how block 974961 filled to 99.85% of capacity while its raw size stayed near 1.1 MB. Most of the current density flows from Runes mints, notably UNCOMMON•GOODS, the first rune issued around the April 2024 Bitcoin Halving and a sibling standard to Bitcoin Ordinals inscriptions. These transfers use pay-to-anchor outputs and compact structures of roughly 80 to 100 virtual bytes, letting miners fit thousands more transactions than conventional formats allow. The two records also sit under different rulebooks, the 1 MB cap of 2015 against today's weight ceiling, so the totals are not strictly comparable.

Seven of the Ten Biggest Days

Daily totals frame the block record from the other side. Seven of the ten highest-volume days in Bitcoin's history have occurred in 2026, blockchain transaction-count data shows, led by the all-time peak of 927,010 on April 23, 2024 and followed by October 23, 2026 at 913,196, within 13,814 of the record. Yet November opened slow: the first seven days averaged about 534,200 transactions, roughly 25% below October's 710,400, and the count fell to 381,886 on November 2, the lowest since March 17. Our reading is that the two threads move separately. A miner willing to fill a block with sub-1-sat/vB Runes mints can chase the all-time mark without moving meaningful value, and 0.0024 Bitcoin (BTC) in fees on block 974961 shows exactly how little economic weight that throughput carried.