How much money did the BRC-20 hot miners make?

In March 2023, Twitter user @domodata created an experimental token standard for Bitcoin, which uses serial inscriptions of JSON data to deploy tokens, mint, and transfer - which is now BRC-20.

BRC-20 is derived from the Ordinals protocol. It was in its development stage in March and experienced explosive growth in April and May.

On-chain data shows that starting from May 1, the average transaction fee of BTC began to increase significantly, from the initial 2U to the current 20U .

Bitcoin average transaction fee trend chart

The composition of miners' income - Currently, miners' income consists of two parts:

● Block reward : 6.25 $BTC / block

● Transaction fee : This is the fee for packaging transactions. The transaction fee varies according to the network conditions and user settings. Measured by each byte, the current average fee for low priority in the Bitcoin memepool is about 300 sats/byte, which is about 11u/byte.

The transaction fee income of Bitcoin miners for a single block has exceeded 1$BTC since May 1st, and has been rising rapidly. In the past few hours on the morning of the 8th, the transaction fee income of miners for a single block has reached an astonishing 6$BTC. The transaction fees of some blocks even exceed the block rewards themselves.

Currently, the total transaction fees spent by BRC-20 are about 493 bitcoins, of which 245 were spent in the last 24 hours, accounting for 49.6% of the expenditure since the birth of BRC-20.

BRC-20 is so popular, how much money did miners make?

We roughly counted the Bitcoin miners’ income in the past week from May 1st to 8th (our deadline is: 11:31:34 am, May 8th, Beijing time ) and obtained the following data:

1. During the statistical period, the total income of miners is (block reward + transaction fee): 8100 BTC;

2. Among them, the number of statistical blocks is 1090, and the total block reward for miners is: 1090X6.25, a total of 6812.5 $BTC

3. During the statistical period, the total transaction fee income obtained by miners was approximately: 1,288 $BTC, accounting for 15.9% of the total income. That is to say, Bitcoin miners captured more than $36 million worth of transaction fees in the past week.

4. Calculated by the proportion of mining pools, Foundry mining pool received the largest fee income, about 11.736 million US dollars . The specific mining pool fee amount and proportion are as follows:

Foundry 32.6% 420 pieces $11.736 million
Antpool 19.88% 256 tokens $7.2 million
f2pool 10.49% 135 pieces $3.78 million
ViaBTC 8.52% 110 coins 3.08 million USD

High “GAS” moments in Bitcoin’s history — While current Bitcoin transaction fees are high, there have been higher records in history.

On December 22, 2017, the average transaction fee for each Bitcoin transaction on that day exceeded 55u, and the high transaction fee state lasted for about two weeks, corresponding to the stage when Bitcoin peaked at 20,000 US dollars in the bull market in 2017. In 2017, at the block height of 500521, the transaction fee reward for a block reached ‎13.7 BTC. According to the currency standard, this is the block with the highest transaction fee.

On April 22, 2021, the average transaction fee for each Bitcoin transaction on that day exceeded 62u, and the high transaction fee state lasted for about two weeks, which also corresponds to the stage of peaking at $64,000 in the previous bull market. https://mempool.space/ block/0000000000000000000bfa75b9bc2ecd104386e7b6877a5fedd8a791469f3a99

From this, it seems that the three most profitable methods in the cryptocurrency world are: Bitcoin mining, exchanges, and coin issuance factories. This is true.

Ordinals and the future of BRC-20

This round of increase in Bitcoin network transaction fees is mainly due to the hype of ordinarys NFT and BRC-20.

In particular, the BRC-20 token $VMPX has become the main driving force behind this round of increase in Bitcoin transaction fees.

$VMPX is a BRC-20 token launched by the 21st Google employee and XEN founder @mrJackLevin‌. It was publicly minted in the early hours of this morning and has now been minted. When it was launched, it caused the main BRC-20 trading website unisat and wallet to crash.

In addition, because the current liquidity of BRC-20 is not sufficient, CEX needs to release its liquidity, and some CEXs have begun to list related tokens.

The first BRC-20 is listed on CEX

BRC-20 emerged with the same controversy and popularity as MEME coin, with questions from Bitcoin OGs, enthusiastic jubilation from the market, silent but profitable Bitcoin miners, and a Bitcoin network so congested that exchanges had to suspend withdrawals. All these have added more question marks to whether BRC-20 can truly develop into an independent narrative and a stable sector.

At present, the extremely high fee threshold and operation threshold have also hindered the development of BRC20. It is worth paying attention to whether BRC20 can be combined with the Lightning Network in the future, whether it can break away from the simple coin issuance narrative, and integrate Bitcoin L2 with smart contract functions such as RGB, etc.

It is unknown how much change BRC-20 will bring, but the stone has been thrown into the center of the lake, and all we can feel are the ripples.

The thing that will never stop in the crypto industry is new stories.