Miners process transactions and receive fees from users (supply-side fees).

Bitcoin is a distributed ledger for transfer and store of value (a blockchain). Bitcoin was founded by a pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto and launched in 2009.

BTC holders own and govern the protocol. They currently do not take a cut of the total transaction fees paid by users (revenue).

github

block explorer

Blockchains (L1)

Bitcoin

# Bitcoin Average transaction fee Methodology

## 1. Overview

The Bitcoin average transaction fee metric measures the mean cost per transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain, expressed in USD. This metric answers the question: "What is the typical fee a user pays to have their transaction included in a Bitcoin block?" The calculation divides the total daily transaction fees by the total number of transactions processed that day.

## 2. Data sources

The calculation relies on four primary data sources:

- **Bitcoin blockchain block data**: Contains block-level information including total fees collected per block, block timestamps, and block heights
- **Bitcoin blockchain transaction data**: Individual transaction records with transaction hashes, block references, timestamps, and individual transaction fees  
- **End-of-day price feeds**: BTC/USD exchange rates from two sources - Chainlink price feeds for recent data (December 2019 onwards) and CoinGecko historical data for earlier periods
- **Token metadata**: Bitcoin network parameters for unit conversion (satoshi to BTC conversion factor)

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Daily transaction fee calculation
- **Purpose**: Calculate the total transaction fees collected each day in USD
- **Logic**: Extract fee data from Bitcoin block records, where each block contains a `total_fee_amount` representing the sum of all transaction fees in that block. Convert fees from satoshis to BTC by dividing by 10^8. Group blocks by day using timestamp truncation, then sum all fees for each day. Join with daily BTC/USD price data to convert the BTC fee amounts to USD equivalents by multiplying daily fee totals by the corresponding day's Bitcoin price
- **Key fields**: `total_fee_amount` (total fees per block in satoshis), `block_timestamp` (block creation time), `price` (daily BTC/USD exchange rate)

### Component B: Daily transaction count calculation  
- **Purpose**: Count the total number of transactions processed each day
- **Logic**: Extract individual transaction records from Bitcoin transaction data. Group transactions by day using timestamp truncation of the `block_timestamp`. Count distinct `transaction_hash` values for each day to ensure each transaction is counted only once, even if it appears in multiple data records
- **Key fields**: `transaction_hash` (unique transaction identifier), `block_timestamp` (transaction processing time)

### Component C: Price data consolidation
- **Purpose**: Provide consistent daily BTC/USD prices across the entire Bitcoin history  
- **Logic**: Combine price data from two sources to ensure complete historical coverage. Use Chainlink price feed data for December 10, 2019 onwards, taking the daily average of price readings. For dates before December 10, 2019, use CoinGecko daily price data. Both sources provide daily price points that are matched to transaction dates
- **Key fields**: `price` (BTC/USD exchange rate), `timestamp` (price date), `feed_address` (Chainlink price feed identifier), `coingecko_id` (CoinGecko asset identifier)

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: Join the daily fee totals with daily transaction counts on the date field. Both components are pre-aggregated to daily level, so this is a one-to-one join by date
- **Currency conversion**: USD conversion occurs in the fee calculation component, where BTC fee amounts are multiplied by daily BTC/USD prices before aggregation
- **Time aggregation**: All data is aggregated to daily boundaries using timestamp truncation to day level, ensuring consistent time alignment across fee and count data
- **Final calculation**: Divide total daily fees in USD by total daily transaction count using safe division to handle edge cases where transaction count might be zero. This produces the average transaction fee in USD for each day

*This methodology was automatically generated by Token Terminal's methodology analyzer.*

BitcoinBTC

Average transaction fee

Average transaction fee

Competitive landscape