Bitcoin TX Payments Rival Ethereum Amidst Regular Revival: Glassnode

According to blockchain data, the Bitcoin network collected transaction fees from its users along with Ethereum last week.

The reversal of Ethereum's high-cost network bucks a trend that has lasted for years, and raises questions about both Bitcoin's utility and long-term security.

Price of inscriptions

According to IntoTheBlock, Bitcoin payments “surpassed Ethereum” last week, totaling $61 million between November 18 and November 25.

The market data provider's figure is slightly higher than Glassnode's, whose data shows payments of ~$52.6 million over the same period. Meanwhile, Ethereum payouts on Glassnode reached ~$61.5 million.

These figures are very close to normal. In November 2022, for example, Glassnode shows that Ethereum collected $92.2 million in total payments, while Bitcoin only generated $12.5 million in the month.

The difference compared to last year is due to the newly developed protocol “ordinals” for writing non-BTC tokens on the Bitcoin blockchain, which became popular earlier this year.

The technology supports both fungible tokens (e.g. stablecoins) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on Bitcoin – two key features that once distinguished Ethereum from its bigger sibling. As the popularity of both use cases increased in May, Bitcoin transaction fees also exploded to $124 million in the month.

The pattern repeated itself in November: when the standard blew 40 million total articles, the average BTC transaction fee rose to $12.96 in the week before November 13, while the average Ethereum transaction was $7.52.

At the time of the price cut two weeks ago, those figures were just $2.56 for Bitcoin and $4.94 for Ethereum.

Advantages and disadvantages of high fees

Mining NFTs like Ethereum can be particularly expensive because their image data is embedded directly into the Bitcoin blockchain. This causes them to take up more memory space in each Bitcoin block, leaving less space for regular, low-fee transactions to be processed efficiently.

On the other hand, high payouts bring high profits to Bitcoin miners, which motivates them to maintain the security of the network.

According to the Hashrate Index, more than 12% of rewards for Bitcoin mining pool FoundryUSA this month came from transaction fees alone, averaging 0.77 BTC.