MILESTONE | Bitcoin Micro-Transactions Surge to Record Highs with Little Economic Value

Bitcoin network activity has climbed to within striking distance of record highs as a surge in low-value transactions reshapes how the world’s largest cryptocurrency blockchain is being used, according to data from blockchain analytics firm CryptoQuant.

Transactions worth less than 0.01 bitcoin now account for roughly 80% of daily activity on the network, nearly double their share in 2023, driven largely by data inscription protocols such as Ordinals, Runes and BRC-20 tokens rather than traditional value transfers.

Bitcoin Ordinals are a way of encoding arbitrary data into Bitcoin transactions, making it possible to store metadata related to NFTs on the Bitcoin blockchain.

The increase has pushed CryptoQuant’s Bitcoin Network Activity Index into positive territory for the first time since 2024, leaving overall network activity about 7% below its all-time high reached in September 2024 despite subdued bitcoin prices.

CryptoQuant said the trend reflects growing demand to use Bitcoin as a data layer rather than solely as a payments network. However, it warned that the proliferation of small, data-heavy transactions is increasing competition for limited block space, potentially driving up fees for conventional financial transfers.

The emergence of Bitcoin Ordinals back in 2023 caused a significant surge in the usage, fees, and storage space of the Bitcoin Network. In May 2023, the revenue generated from Bitcoin mining experienced a significant rise, reaching $916.6 million.

The rise in activity has also coincided with near-record use of Bitcoin’s OP_RETURN feature, which allows data to be embedded on the blockchain. The change follows a contentious 2025 decision by Bitcoin Core developers to remove long-standing limits on the amount of data that could be relayed through the mechanism, a move critics argued would encourage non-financial uses of the network.

Bitcoin’s mempool, where unconfirmed transactions wait to be processed, has also swelled to around 128,000 transactions, its highest level since February 2025, underscoring mounting congestion across the network.

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