Mining
Transaction fees become a larger share of miner revenue, and a more volatile one
Fee income now swings between a few percent and a third of block rewards within the same month, complicating budgeting.
Transaction fees have grown into a structurally larger share of bitcoin miner revenue since the last subsidy halving, but the share is far less stable than the block reward it increasingly supplements.
Our analysis of block-level data shows fee income ranging from low single digits to roughly a third of total revenue within individual months, driven by bursts of inscription-style activity and periodic exchange rebalancing.
Volatility of that magnitude is difficult to budget against. Miners with hedged power costs and unhedged revenue effectively hold a long position in network congestion.
Some operators have begun selling forward a portion of expected production, but hashprice derivatives remain thin and pricing reflects that illiquidity.
Mempool composition explains much of the variability. Periods of sustained high fees have coincided with a small number of applications batching activity, and those applications migrate between chains.
The long-run question is whether fee revenue can grow enough to replace the subsidy across future halvings. Nothing in the current data settles it either way.
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