Bitcoin Is Busier Than Ever, but Bitcoin Mining Isn’t Getting Paid More

Bitcoin is processing more transactions than ever before on an annual basis, but the growing activity is doing little to improve one of the network’s most important revenue streams, mining and transaction fees. The Bitcoin network averaged 578,000 transactions per day from January 1 through September 28, 2026, surpassing its previous annual record of roughly 525,000 transactions in 2024. Yet the average transaction fee has fallen sharply, leaving miners increasingly dependent on newly issued BTC rather than payments from users. Firsthand reported that fees accounted for just 0.6% of miners’ total earnings during the period it examined. This gap raises a bigger question about Bitcoin’s economics: if network usage continues to expand, why isn’t that activity generating more income for the miners securing the blockchain?

First reported by Cryptonews. This page is a short excerpt; the full text is theirs.