Catenaa, Saturday, June 14, 2025-Bitcoin transaction activity recently reached its lowest point since October 2023, despite BTC trading near record highs, according to a report by The Block.
The seven-day moving average of transactions fell to roughly 317,000 on June 6, down from 269,000 in October and 256,000 on June 1, signaling decreased network usage.
This decline has led some miners to accept transactions with fees below Bitcoin Core’s standard relay floor of 1 satoshi per virtual byte (sat/vB). Notably, Mononaut, founder of open-source explorer Mempool, confirmed a transaction with a near-zero fee of 0.1 sat/vB was recently mined by Marathon Digital (MARA), which operates a low-fee pipeline called Slipstream.
Mononaut’s transaction sat in the mempool for a month and cost about 11 sats, or one cent.
On June 6, 31 Bitcoin Core developers released an open letter urging nodes not to reject low-fee or non-standard transactions if miners include them, citing Bitcoin’s censorship-resistant nature.
They stressed that filtering such transactions risks weakening decentralization by pushing users toward private channels like Slipstream.
However, this stance faced criticism from figures like Samson Mow, founder of Jan3, who argued on X that Bitcoin Core developers were enabling spam by lowering barriers for low-fee transactions.
The ongoing debate reflects tensions between maintaining network security and preserving Bitcoin’s open, censorship-resistant ethos amid fluctuating transaction demand.
