Bitcoin is having a strangely quiet year on-chain. After a surge of speculative flows in 2024, the network is now running at near clockwork efficiency.
Average block sizes have shrunk, daily fees are less than half of what they were in January, and the fee-to-reward ratio has fallen to levels last seen in the year before the Ordinals and Inscription boom.
But Price hasn’t followed the same rhythm. It has been flat in recent weeks, struggling to break above $110,000.
A look under the hood reveals that the network is running cold, even as the market tries to stay warm. Total daily fees have fallen from around 4.7 BTC in early January to just over 2 BTC this month, a 56% decline since the beginning of the year.
All moving averages tell the same story. The 30-day and 90-day EMAs have been trending downward since March, with only short-term increases around isolated bursts of registration activity.
The fee-to-reward ratio, a clear measure of how much of a miner’s revenue comes from users rather than subsidies, has fallen to 0.78% over the past three months from 1.35% in the first quarter.
This ratio is important because it shows how Bitcoin’s security is funded. When users pay higher prices, they effectively share the cost of maintaining the network. With fewer fees, the burden goes back to the subsidy, or 3.125 BTC created per block. Since the block reward is fixed, miners are more dependent on the BTC/USD exchange rate itself. At $110,000, the network is still profitable, but the correlation is clear. Price softening translates directly into pressure on miners’ margins.
On-chain stagnation has another impact. Average block size decreased by approximately 10% from Q1 to approximately 1.53 MB. Meanwhile, memory pool congestion has largely gone away except for a few short-term spikes.
This is a plus for traders. Cheaper and more predictable payments shorten confirmation windows for exchanges, ETF setups, and market makers who manage flows between venues. Individual users will also be able to settle transactions faster and at lower costs. In reality, Bitcoin’s base layer functions more like a low-latency payment network than a crowded auction.
But the same data also show structural changes.
The 30-day correlation between fees and prices is negative for most of the year. Historically, price increases have tended to accompany memory pool congestion as new users increase. In this cycle, liquidity appears to be moving elsewhere: aggregation, batch, or off-chain. This separation shows that the microstructure of the Bitcoin market has evolved. Activity that was once visible on-chain is now decentralized through exchanges and custodians, and despite expanding market capitalization, the blockchain itself remains quiet.
This is a risky business for miners. The decline in fees seen since the beginning of the year, from about $576,000 per day in the first quarter to about $410,000 today, shows that the buffer against falling prices is fading. If Bitcoin falls below $100,000, profits could be sharply compressed. That could turn the economics of the halving era into a more levered bet on spot prices, especially while fee burdens are low.
Still, this also has its advantages. The current state of the network is stable, predictable, and inexpensive to use. Even with high throughput, average fees remain low, meaning Bitcoin’s appeal as a payment layer remains intact. If the market remains stable near $110,000 without any new fee increases, Bitcoin could exhibit a new equilibrium, becoming a rare asset backed by an unusually efficient base layer and traded at an institutional scale.
Whether that continues depends on demand. If registration-level traffic returns or inflows from retailers increase again, average fees could return to Q1 levels. But for now, blockchain is silent. mempool runs quieter, blocks are smaller, and the network is more stable, but its price, at least for now, is not cheap.
(Tag Translation) Bitcoin
