I have some Satoshi to send or Bitcoin (BTC) wallets to rearrange? It's getting cheaper and cheaper to do it. According to a report by Arcane Research, Bitcoin "transaction fees have remained low since July 2021 and show no signs of increasing."
However, there was a small increase in transaction fees last week. Shown as a small jump at the bottom of the chart, the mempool clustering pushed "average daily transaction fees over the last seven days to $691,000, a doubling since last Tuesday."
However, the doubling of transaction fees is insignificant: transaction fees remained in a low range. Miners reviewed mempool transactions over a two-day period, securing the network and keeping transactions affordable.
Eric Yakes, author of the book Bitcoin the seventh property told Cointelegraph there were three main reasons why transaction costs are so low: Segwit adoption, hash rate redistribution, and Bitcoin's layer 2 infrastructure. like the almost instant payment lightning network Kicking.
โJune 2021 saw a huge increase in the percentage of Segwit transactions on chain rising from ~50% to ~70%, which has steadily increased to over 80%, which should fundamentally increase transaction throughput for the network".
Cointelegraph reported on the growing number of exchanges using Segwit addresses in the course of 2021.
In July 2021, Yakes explains that "the difficulty of the network hit rock bottom and has since climbed to ATHโ, following Chinaโs ban and hash rate redistribution. Combined with the increase in the number of Segwit transactions:
"This spike in hash rate has found locks more quickly than the difficulty setting can support and that has created faster transaction settlement than otherwise, driving down the price of transactions."
However, Yakes mentions that transaction fees โshould not be expected to remain persistent. Eventually, and this all depends on price, hash rate and difficulty will find their balance, making the fee market less competitive and transaction costs rising.โ
Tomer Strolight, editor-in-chief of Swan Bitcoin, names another factor why transaction fees are low:
โNow we have the largest exchanges, all batch transactions. This means that they are sending 100 or more withdrawals in a single transaction instead of the terrible practice of several years ago of sending each withdrawal as one."
Additionally, thanks to the Lightning Network's ability to open "channels when the blockchain is not congested and then use them over and over again, it prevents the chain from becoming congested every time a faster and cheaper Lightning transaction is an option."
Arcane's research report indicates that while these four factors are important, it is also "likely that fewer transactions per day have lowered the average transaction fee."
For Yakes, "transaction fees could increase in the short term, but there are so many trends against higher transaction fees that I think they will be persistently lower in the long term."
Related: Bitcoin Back at $42K as Markets Await Potential 7.9% CPI Inflation Data
Tromer is also positive:
"I really see that we can gradually build the capacity of the network to handle all the trade in the world without the blockchain becoming an insurmountable bottleneck."
It's another feather to the BTC cap: the protocol continues to successfully scale, making it more affordable to transact on the network.
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