The Bit market recently revealed a significant divergence between price and on-chain activity: Despite the continuous challenge to historical highs, daily transaction numbers have quietly fallen. What exactly happened? Here are the potential subtle changes in the Bit market.
Trading Volume Hits Bottom, Price Rebounds
The seven-day moving average of Bit network transactions recently reached a 19-month low. According to The Block data, this value is approximately 317,000 transactions, a new low since October 2023. Additionally, YCharts indicators show only about 256,000 transactions were packed into blocks on June 1, 2025. The cooling of trading activity has allowed some extremely low-fee transactions to be completed, even including transactions below Bit Core's default relay minimum price (1 sat/vB).
Mempool founder Mononaut reported a transaction with a near-zero fee (0.1 sat/vB, about $0.01) that was mined by MARA through its low-fee transaction channel Slipstream after being dormant for a month. Mononaut believes this was a carefully designed transaction:
Meticulously crafted with only the finest hexadecimal characters, this transaction cost only 11 Sats, approximately $0.01, and was stored in the mempool for a month.
This deliberate placement of transactions to trade at below-market prices has sparked some controversy, with some people considering it spam on the Bit network.
Core Policy Controversy: Tug of War between Openness and Order
In response, 31 Bitcoin Core developers issued an open letter on June 6th, arguing that low-fee or non-standard transactions should not be refused if miners are willing to pack them. They believe this is crucial to Bit's nature as an anti-censorship system, emphasizing that this does not endorse non-financial data usage but accepts that Bit might be used for purposes not everyone agrees with, and pushing users to private channels would undermine decentralization.
However, this statement has drawn criticism from some community members. Jan3 founder Samson Mow stated on the X platform:
"Bitcoin Core developers have been gradually changing the network to enable spam, and now seem focused on removing barriers for spammers. Simply saying 'this is the status quo, too bad' is dishonest."
One core of the controversy is that Bitcoin Core developers removed the 80-byte data limit for transaction relay, allowing larger data embedding. Developers believe this helps predict transaction packing and speeds up block propagation, but critics worry about potential centralization and "spam" issues.
Supply Decreases, Wallet Numbers Increase
Despite the decline in transaction numbers, other on-chain indicators show a different picture. Bit supply on exchanges has dropped to a near seven-year low (less than 11%), mainly due to the long-term holding (HODLing) trend and increased institutional adoption, with ETFs and corporate buyers continuously absorbing market liquidity.
Additionally, Santiment data shows that large holders' ("whale") Bit inflows have significantly grown by 145% to 214% in the past 7 to 30 days. Wallet creation numbers are also increasing, with nearly 557,000 new wallets created on a single day (May 29, 2024), the highest daily record since December 2023.
Meanwhile, indicators suggest that transaction volumes in USD can still be massive, sometimes exceeding $44 billion in a single day, indicating that large institutional transfers continue to occur frequently.
