- That’s more than earnings for all of 2022
- The reason for the increase in earnings was the rate hike
- And the popularity of BRC-20 tokens
Coin Metrics analysts provided a report on the cryptocurrency market. It shows that bitcoin miners earned a record $184 million in commissions in Q2 of this year. Their revenue is up 270% over Q1 2023.
Miner fees have exceeded the $100 million mark for the first time since Q2 2021. Recall that bitcoin reached its price peak of $68,000 at the time.
Bitcoin miners earn a commission for checking blocks in transactions. The amount of fees depends on two key factors – the amount of data and the user’s need for block space. The higher the load on the network, the higher the commission.
The Coin Metrics report cites two reasons for the increase in commissions on the Bitcoin network. The first is the rise in the price of cryptocurrency. Since January 1, the BTC exchange rate has risen by about 85%. And that means the amount of commissions in dollar terms has increased.
The second reason is the emergence of the new BRC-20 token standard, which is used to create NFTs on the Bitcoin blockchain.
We note that commissions are only a small part of the total money that bitcoin miners earned in the second quarter. Fees account for only 7.7% of the $2.4 billion total.
In the meantime, bitcoin as an asset is showing important changes. Its correlation with the stock market has fallen to almost zero. This means that macro data has less impact on the cryptocurrency exchange rate.