- Bitcoin collected $93 million in fees in the last seven days, 38% more than Ethereum.
- The price of Bitcoin was 5.59% higher than the average price at which all coins were bought.
Bitcoin [BTC] became the number one-ranked network in transaction fees collected over the last week, giving proponents of its ‘transaction settlement layer’ narrative something to cheer for.
Bitcoin miners rake in the moolah
According to AMBCrypto’s analysis of Token Terminal data, the first-generation blockchain collected $93 million in fees in the last seven days, significantly higher than Ethereum’s [ETH] tally in the same period.
Source: Token Terminal
The spike in fee revenue boosted miners’ overall earnings, which are made up of transaction fees and set block rewards.
The average daily miner revenue has increased from $25 million in October to more than $40 million in December, AMBCrypto discovered using Glassnode’s data.
Source: Glassnode
Bitcoin’s prominence as a transaction settlement network was also evidenced by the jump in average fees paid for each transaction.
According to Glassnode, the mean fees climbed exponentially over the last month. Users had to spend as much as $37 on average to get their transactions validated on the 17th of December.
This, for a blockchain that barely saw average fees cross over $2 in 2022.
Source: Glassnode
Ordinals craze boosts Bitcoin’s prospects
The spike in fees was a consequence of the growing demand for Ordinals inscriptions. The total number of inscriptions on the chain topped the 50 million mark as of this writing, AMBCrypto’s examination of a Dune dashboard revealed.
Ordinals took the blockchain world by storm in 2023. Pioneered by Bitcoin in early 2023, other EVM and non-EVM chains have mimicked the technology and launched their own Inscriptions.
The dominant use case has been creating NFTs on-chain, which has significantly boosted Bitcoin’s NFT activity.
As per CryptoSlam, Bitcoin has been the dominant chain for NFT trades over the last month, with cumulative sales worth more than $797 million.
Read Bitcoin’s [BTC] Price Prediction 2023-24
Bitcoin fell back to the $42,000 region at press time, as a few profit-hungry traders exited the market. As per CoinMarketCap, the coin lost 1.34% of its value in the last 24 hours.
Shivam Thakral, CEO of Indian cryptocurrency exchange BuyUcoin, stated in a quote shared with AMBCrypto,
“The overall market sentiment is on the positive side owing to positive macroeconomic factors.”
