Bitcoin’s network is known for a lot of things, and low transaction fees are undoubtedly one of them.
Less than an hour ago, we saw another example of this as upwards of $1 billion worth of BTC was transferred from one address to another for a fee of $4 at current rates.
$1 Billion Worth of BTC Transferred for $4
Whale transactions are not uncommon in the cryptocurrency field. At the beginning of July, CryptoPotato reported that someone had moved $933 million worth of Bitcoin (around 101,860 BTC) for about $0.48. This represented about 0.5% of Bitcoin’s total supply.
Now, another transaction of similar proportions took place less than an hour ago. According to Whale Alert, someone transferred 92,857 BTC, worth upwards of $1 billion, for a fee of just $4.
🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 92,857 #BTC (1,092,603,630 USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet
— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) August 6, 2020
While the transaction in Whale Alert’s interface shows that the sender was Xapo, someone has pointed out that it’s not. Instead, the user pointed out that this is a BitGo custodial wallet for Bitstamp’s cold storage “that was migrated in October 2019.”
In any case, the transaction fee, despite being particularly low compared to what traditional financial institutions would charge for an amount of the kind, is still substantially higher than the one carried out last month.
BTC Transaction Fees Surging
Indeed, looking at Bitcoin transaction fees, there’s a tremendous increase over the past 30 days.
Data from Bitinfocharts shows that on July 5th, the average transaction fee for Bitcoin’s network was around $0.835. Yesterday, the same metric was $5.35. This is a total increase of more than 540%.
This could be explained by the increased usage of the network. Looking at the Mempool, which displays the total aggregate size in bytes of transactions that wait to be confirmed.
We can see that on July 7th, the number was about 10 million, while today it was around 48 million. In other words, people who want their transaction to be prioritized would currently have to pay an increased fee to the miners.
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