Bitcoin Fee Pressure History

Pre-aggregated fee-rate stats per day bucket from our own bitcoind 28 via getblockstats. This is what fees blocks actually confirmed at — not what the mempool was predicting.

Why this chart, not a mempool-depth chart? Mempool depth (tx count waiting) is local node state and only goes back as far as your node was observing. Fee pressure goes back to genesis — every confirmed block records the fees it accepted. A low-fee spam wave can inflate mempool depth without affecting real users; fee pressure ignores transactions that never confirm and shows what it actually cost to get included. For "how busy was the chain in [year]?" this is the better answer.

Blocks in window

4,293

30 day buckets

Avg p50

1.2 sat/vB

Peak p90

61 sat/vB

Floor p10

0 sat/vB

State distribution (by block, across the window)

98%

Low 98.4% (4,226 blocks) Moderate 1.6% (67 blocks) High 0.0% (0 blocks) Severe 0.0% (0 blocks)

Fee-rate percentiles over time

Logarithmic Y-axis — fees during ordinals storms can be 100× calm-chain rates. p10 / p50 / p90 shown by default; toggle others in the legend. Each point is one day bucket: p10 = floor (min during bucket), p50 = average median (typical block), p90 = peak (worst spike in bucket). The dashed blue line is USD per vB (median) on the right axis — its divergence from the orange p50 sat/vB line is the BTC-appreciation effect: sats become cheaper as BTC becomes more valuable, so the same dollar buys more blockspace. Toggle the dotted purple BTC/USD line in the legend to see the price climb directly. BTC/USD prices are the one piece of data on this page we don't compute from our own node — they come from mempool.space's historical-price feed, same source the live UI uses.

Window: 2026-05-05T00:00:00 to 2026-06-03T00:00:00 UTC · 4,293 blocks aggregated into 30 day buckets.

Data via the ChainQuery.com signal APIs Bitcoin Fee Pressure (GET /v1/signals/chain/block-fees/aggregate?bucket=day). Per-block detail also available at /v1/signals/chain/block-fees/history (10K-row cap).

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