Transaction Fees in Bitcoin Surpass Ethereum Last Week: Here’s the Reason!

• On-chain data shows that Bitcoin reached a total transaction fee of more than $61 million last week.
• One reason behind this high traffic is the cryptocurrency’s recent rally, which should have sparked new interest in the asset.
• Bitcoin’s total transaction fees are still ahead of ETH, indicating that BTC is something special fueling the indicator.

Transaction fees in Bitcoin surpass Ethereum, revealing surprising data: Current transaction fee on-chain data!

Bitcoin’s Transaction Fees Surpass Ethereum

On-chain data reveals that Bitcoin reached a total transaction fee exceeding $61 million last week. According to data from the market intelligence platform IntoTheBlock, BTC transaction fees have recently exceeded those of ETH. Here, “transaction fees” refer to the amount that each sender on the network needs to add as a reward to the chain verifier who processes their transfer.

The amount an average user will add as a fee depends on the traffic conditions on the blockchain at that moment. When there is high traffic on the network, some transfers may have to wait for a while because chain verifiers have a limited capacity to process them.

Since the chain prioritizes transfers with the highest fees, any user who wants to get their transaction through as quickly as possible during such congestion will have to pay significantly higher fees than average.

Therefore, when the blockchain observes many users making transactions simultaneously, fees can rapidly increase as senders compete with each other to enter the valuable block space. The Bitcoin network has seen a sharp increase in total transaction fees recently, as shown in the graph below:

Here, “total fees” naturally represent the total amount of transaction fees added by individual users to their transactions. The recent increase in this amount clearly indicates that the network has been quite congested lately. One reason behind this high traffic is the recent rally in the cryptocurrency, which must have sparked new interest in the asset.

Bitcoin’s Surge in Inscriptions

Interestingly, total transaction fees last week actually exceeded those of Ethereum, measuring approximately $61 million. Since ETH has also seen an increase lately, the coin itself will experience a burst of activity to some extent.

However, Bitcoin’s total transaction fees still surpass those of ETH, indicating that there is something unique fueling BTC’s momentum. In fact, “inscriptions” have recently experienced a revival and surged. Inscriptions are essentially data written directly to the BTC blockchain.

These enable a variety of applications, including NFTs and BRC-20 tokens, directly on the BTC blockchain. Inscriptions behave like all other transactions on the network, so they also affect the economy related to them. The traffic and activity of this application on the network resulted in an increase in transaction fees and enabled miners to process more transactions.