AntPool mines near-record Bitcoin block as transaction fees stay negligible

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AntPool mines near-record Bitcoin block

Highlights

AntPool mined Bitcoin block 974,961 with 11,255 transactions and collected just 240,533 satoshis ($180) in fees, while the overall payout was about $237,000.
Despite high transaction counts, fee generation remains weak as median fee rates hovered near zero and fees comprised less than 0.2% of miner rewards in the latest block.
Miners still depend on the 3.125 BTC subsidy, with hashrate earnings at $32 per petahash per day and a projected difficulty decrease of 4% around Nov. 13.

Near-record block volume and fee breakdown

As reported by CoinDesk, AntPool mined block 974,961 on Saturday with 11,255 transactions, making it Bitcoin’s second-busiest block on record. The total fees on those transactions came to 240,533 satoshis, or about $180 at Sunday’s bitcoin price near $75,800, while the miner’s overall payout was about $237,000.

That leaves almost all of the reward tied to Bitcoin’s fixed 3.125 BTC mining subsidy rather than user-paid fees. The block falls 984 transactions short of the network record of 12,239 transactions, which F2Pool packed into block 367,853 on Aug. 1, 2015.

It is the second such low-fee, high-volume block in a week. On Nov. 4, AntPool’s block 974,557 carried 10,573 transactions and generated about $110 in fees.

Users compete for block space by paying a fee rate per virtual byte, the metric used to measure how much space a transaction consumes. mempool.space rounds the median fee rate in Saturday’s block to zero, and a CoinDesk sample using mempool.space data showed a series of 80-byte transactions each paying a single satoshi while carrying a small data output.

Pressure on miner economics before 2028 halving

The contrast with the 2015 record block underscores how weak fee generation remains despite heavy transaction counts. That block paid 0.22582926 BTC in fees, about 94 times more bitcoin-denominated fees than AntPool collected on Saturday, though the dollar value at the time was about $64 with bitcoin trading near $285, while the 25 BTC subsidy was worth about $7,100.

Current miner economics still depend heavily on the subsidy. Hashrate Index data show miners currently earn about $32 per petahash per day, while mempool.space projects mining difficulty to fall about 4% around Nov. 13 after increases of 5.92% on Oct. 16 and 5.54% on Oct. 29.

The subsidy is projected to halve to 1.5625 BTC at block 1,050,000, expected around April 2028. Based on Saturday’s block, fee income at that level would replace less than 0.2% of the subsidy miners are set to lose, underscoring the limited role transaction fees are currently playing in sustaining the sector.

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