Bitcoin Transaction Volume Hits Two-Year Low, Despite Rock-Bottom Fees

Bitcoin’s sideways price action has led to the lowest number of confirmed transactions per day since March 2016, according to Blockchain.info.

Data shows BTC transactions falling in line with downward trends in price since the all-time highs of December 2017.

The number of transactions reached a two-year low on Feb. 26 with only 180,000 confirmed transactions, while Sunday, March 4 saw just 195,500.

The slump comes at a time when Bitcoin struggles to regain the sky-high USD value it achieved late last year, when it reached $20,000 on some major exchanges.

Despite the release of support for Segregated Witness (SegWit) technology by Bitcoin Core and exchanges Coinbase and Bitfinex in February, faster and cheaper Bitcoin transactions appear to interest investors less than overall trading potential.

SegWit is slowly cornering the BTC transaction market, constituting almost 30% of transactions according to data from monitoring site SegWit Party.

A glance at popular trading platforms likewise confirms the current consumer desire to ‘hodl’ on to one’s bitcoins and watch the market, rather than cash out or convert currencies. P2P resource Localbitcoins posted six-month lows in weekly trade volumes across global markets, with a total of just under $57 mln transactions during the week ending Feb. 24.

Low transaction numbers and the small size of BTC’s catalog of unprocessed transactions continue to create some of the cheapest fees seen in months, with Earn.com’s calculator currently recommending 40 satoshis, or about $0.005, per byte.