Bitcoin fees plummet as mempool clears to zero

The clear mempool meant that that thousands of stuck transactions pending confirmation were included in recent blocks, leaving very few unconfirmed transactions still outstanding.

A smaller mempool is good news for regular Bitcoin users as it reduces competition among fresh transactions to get included in upcoming blocks.

Reduced competition in the mempool helps to drive down Bitcoin transaction fees, as miners can potentially include all transactions in the mempool irrespective of their individual fee amounts.

Average Bitcoin transaction fees reached a peak of $13.16 per transaction on Oct. 30, when more than 140,000 transactions were pending in the mempool.

This allowed miners to reduce the number of unconfirmed transactions to zero on Nov. 9.

As of this writing, there were approximately 6,000 transactions in the mempool with a median fee of 3 satoshis per byte or roughly $0.11.

Some users have reported fees as low as 1 sat/byte for transactions that have confirmed within a few hours.

Bitcoin transaction fees had been comparatively low through the second half of 2020.

During the last week of October, the price of BTC consolidated above the $13,000 mark for the first time since December 2017 - coinciding with a massive increase in transactions being sent to the mempool and resulting in a backlog of unconfirmed transactions.

With network activity subsiding over the course of a bullish week, Bitcoin users are being encouraged to take advantage of current conditions by performing transactions that may be too expensive to perform with higher fees, such as opening Lightning Network channels and consolidating inputs.