AntPool mined Bitcoin's second-busiest block on record over the weekend, packing 11,255 transactions into a single block that generated only about $180 in fees, according to mempool.space data.
Block 974,961, mined on Saturday, fell 984 transactions short of the all-time high of 12,239 set by F2Pool in block 367,853 on Aug. 1, 2015. The total fee take of 240,533 satoshis — one satoshi is one hundred-millionth of a bitcoin — was worth roughly $180 at Sunday's price near $75,800. AntPool's overall payout came to about $237,000, almost entirely the fixed 3.125 BTC subsidy the network awards to whichever miner finds a block.
It marked the second densely packed block from the pool in a week. On Nov. 4, AntPool's block 974,557 carried 10,573 transactions and collected about $110 in fees.
Bitcoin users compete for block space by bidding a rate per virtual byte, the unit that measures how much room a transaction occupies. Mempool.space rounds the median rate in Saturday's block to zero. A review of transactions sampled from the middle of the block showed a run of 80-byte transactions, each paying a single satoshi and carrying a small data output.
That rate sits below the relay floor that Bitcoin Core 29.1 set by default last year, one-tenth of a satoshi per virtual byte. Because the floor is a node policy rather than a network rule, blocks containing cheaper transactions remain valid. The public data does not show how those transactions reached AntPool.
The 2015 record block paid 0.22582926 BTC in fees, about 94 times the amount collected on Saturday. With bitcoin trading near $285 that day, those fees were worth about $64, while the 25 BTC subsidy of the time came to about $7,100.
The composition of the recent block points to a shift in what is filling Bitcoin's ledger. According to market reports, the surge in transaction count stems less from payment demand than from small data payloads tied to the Runes protocol, which launched in April 2024 and lets users issue and transfer fungible assets on Bitcoin. Data compiled on the block showed 1,585 transactions paying less than one satoshi per virtual byte, accounting for roughly 87.7% of block space, with utilization at 99.85% and a weight of 3,993,844 weight units against a ceiling of 4 million.
Aggregate network activity tells a different story. Average daily transactions ran at about 71,400 in October before sliding to roughly 53,420 between Nov. 1 and Nov. 7, a decline of about 25%, suggesting the block-level spike reflects structural change rather than a broad expansion of usage.
Note: Fee values are converted at the bitcoin price prevailing when each block was mined.
Economics remain the central concern for miners. Current earnings run at about $32 per petahash per day, according to Hashrate Index. Mining difficulty, which governs how hard a block is to find, is projected to drop about 4% around Nov. 13, per mempool.space, after increases of 5.92% on Oct. 16 and 5.54% on Oct. 29.
The subsidy is scheduled to halve to 1.5625 BTC at block 1,050,000, projected for around April 2028. Saturday's fees would offset less than two-tenths of 1% of the subsidy miners stand to lose at that halving, leaving the industry heavily dependent on either a recovery in fee revenue or further gains in bitcoin's price.
For investors, the episode underscores a persistent question about Bitcoin's long-term security budget: whether transaction fees can eventually replace the block subsidy as the primary compensation for miners. A block that sets a near-record for activity while producing fees worth a fraction of a percent of the subsidy suggests that volume alone does not translate into revenue, particularly when the activity is driven by low-value data inscriptions rather than high-fee settlement traffic.
