On-chain data shows that bitcoin miners just witnessed their second-highest earning day in the entire history of the cryptocurrency.
bitcoin Miners Just Raised Nearly $76 Million in Total Revenue
As CryptoQuant's head of research, Julio Moreno, noted in a new mail On X, btc miners have recently seen daily total revenues close to the all-time high.
“Daily revenue” here refers to a measure of the combined revenue that bitcoin miners earn from block rewards and transaction fees (both in USD) every day.
Block rewards are what miners receive as compensation for solving blocks on the network, while transaction fee is what they get for handling individual transactions.
Now, here is a graph showing the trend in daily income of bitcoin miners over the past few years:
<img decoding="async" class="alignnone aligncenter" src="https://technicalterrence.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Bitcoin-Miners-Enjoy-Second-Highest-Daily-Income-in-History.jpeg" alt="bitcoin Miner Income” width=”4096″ height=”2580″/>
The value of the metric appears to have registered a spike in recent days | Source: @jjcmoreno on X
As shown in the graph above, the income of bitcoin miners has seen a huge increase recently. During this surge, miners earned $75.9 million in a 24-hour period.
This was not far off from the metric's all-time high of $77.3 million recorded in April 2021. In fact, this latest peak was greater than any peak seen in the entire history of the cryptocurrency, except for this record itself.
Now, what is the reason behind this sharp increase in the income of bitcoin miners? A look at the chart makes it clear that btc's rally to an all-time high would have been the main driver.
However, the effect of the rebound differs between the two components of the mining company's total income. For block rewards, any increase in price has a linear effect, as the dollar value of these rewards also increases along with it.
Since bitcoin has risen sharply recently, it is not unexpected that block rewards have also skyrocketed in value. However, in the case of transaction fees, the relationship is not so simple.
Total fees depend on the amount of traffic the blockchain currently receives. Traffic tends to increase during rallies as more interest is generated in the cryptocurrency, which increases network fees.
But it is not always clear how much activity will ignite on the blockchain when a rally occurs. On top of that, there are other, often stronger, factors that can drive transaction fees, such as demand for a networking application like Inscriptions.
Transaction fees have increased noticeably with the latest rally, but the absolute value has not been too high, according to data from Y Charts.
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The data for the total btc transaction fees over the past three months | Source: YCharts
On the day of the recent revenue surge, transaction fees amounted to nearly $7 million. However, it is clear that this represented only a little more than 10% of total revenue. Block rewards have therefore been the main driver of the recent increase in bitcoin miners' income.
While miners are enjoying high incomes right now, the next halving, an event where their block rewards will be permanently reduced by half, is scheduled for next month.
With current revenues heavily reliant on block rewards, bitcoin miners could soon face a sharp drop in their revenues unless the price can continue its steep trajectory to offset it, or somehow, the mining fees. transaction can be triggered to close the gap.
btc Price
At the time of writing, bitcoin is trading at around $67,100, up 7% over the past week.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-medium aligncenter" src="https://www.tradingview.com/x/lkI6Izb2/" alt="bitcoin price chart” width=”1534″ height=”854″/>
Looks like the price of the asset has seen a sharp uptrend over the past month | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView
Featured image by Brian Wangenheim on Unsplash.com, YCharts.com, CryptoQuant.com, TradingView.com chart