Bitcoin’s transaction levels have fallen to their lowest in more than a year and a half.

The seven-day moving average reached 316,000 last week but has since recovered slightly to around 350,000.

This decline marks a significant decrease from the peak activity of over 700,000 daily transactions in mid-2024.

The slowdown is linked to reduced activity in Bitcoin-native protocols like Runes and Ordinals, which previously drove higher transaction volumes.

Users have shifted to other blockchains that better support tokens and NFTs, while Bitcoin’s transaction fees have stayed under US$1.50 throughout 2025.

The network now appears to be returning to its original role as a monetary transfer system, with some users testing sub-minimum fee transactions.

In response, mining pool MARA launched “Slipstream” to process these low-fee transactions, sparking debate over censorship resistance in Bitcoin’s ecosystem.

🔗 Source: The Block

🧠 Food for thought

1️⃣ Bitcoin’s transaction cycles reflect evolving network narratives

The current slump to 308,332 daily transactions represents a 51.41% decline from last year, indicating a cyclical pattern that Bitcoin has experienced multiple times before 1.

This decline follows a pattern where network activity surges during periods of new protocol adoption (like Ordinals and Runes) and then reverts to baseline levels when speculation cools.

The current transaction level nearly matches the December 2017 peak of 490,644 transactions during the ICO boom, suggesting that Bitcoin’s network activity correlates strongly with narrative shifts rather than price movements alone 1.

Each of these cycles has historically led to new use cases being tested on Bitcoin—from colored coins in 2014 to Lightning Network payment channels in 2018 to NFT-like inscriptions in 2023—showing how transaction volume serves as an indicator of ecosystem innovation.

This periodic testing of new transaction types continues despite Bitcoin’s technical constraints of approximately 5 transactions per second, demonstrating how its limited throughput creates natural boom-bust cycles in network activity 2.

2️⃣ Transaction fee economics driving governance tensions