Bitcoin Transaction Fees Come Crashing Down Post Halving

Bitcoin (BTC) started the week stable, changing hands above $65,800, as transaction fees have significantly lowered following the halving.

On-chain data from Mempool.space shows that medium-priority transactions are now costing $8.48 while high-priority transactions cost $9.32.

In the initial aftermath of the halving, these fees spiked to over $146 for a medium-priority transaction and $170 for a high-priority transaction.

The hashprice index, a metric created by Luxor to quantify how much a miner can expect to earn from a specific quantity of hashrate, has also dropped from $182.98 per hash/day to $81, a level below where it was at pre-halving.

While bitcoin miners anticipated that the halving would significantly cut revenue, the introduction of Casey Rodarmor’s Runes protocol – designed to create fungible tokens on Bitcoin – which went live at the halving, was supposed to be the antidote to this, given the level of activity it would create on-chain.

Instead, in the initial days after the event, floor prices for the runestone NFT collection have dropped by almost 50% in the last 24 hours with a floor price of nearly 0.037 BTC, according to Magic Eden, while ordinal collections like Bitcoin Puppets and NodeMonkes are up 11% and 8% respectively according to CoinGecko data.

It should be noted that these ordinal collections also generate considerable transaction fees but don’t appear to be the same revenue source as many hoped Runes would be.

CORRECTION (April 22, 2024, 17:40 UTC): Fixes misspelling of Bitcoin Puppets.