Live fee rates from the mempool — what it costs to transact on Bitcoin at this moment.
The numbers above are pulled live from the Bitcoin mempool — the waiting room of unconfirmed transactions. Fee rates are quoted in satoshis per virtual byte (sat/vB): the higher the rate you attach, the sooner miners include your transaction in a block. There is no fixed fee in Bitcoin; it is a continuous auction for limited block space, repriced roughly every ten minutes as new blocks are found.
Fee demand follows human activity. Weekends and the hours when both the US and Europe are asleep (roughly 00:00–08:00 UTC) are usually the quietest, and sustained 1–2 sat/vB windows are common outside bull-market frenzies. If your transaction can wait, the economy rate plus patience routinely saves 50–90% versus the next-block rate.
Miners price transactions by the space they occupy, not their value. A simple SegWit payment of one input and two outputs is about 140 vB, so at 10 sat/vB it costs 1,400 sats regardless of whether it moves $50 or $50 million — one reason Bitcoin is remarkably efficient for large settlements.
Use SegWit (bc1q…) or Taproot (bc1p…) addresses, which are lighter than legacy formats. Consolidate many small UTXOs into one during cheap-fee periods so future spends stay small. And for everyday small payments, the Lightning Network settles instantly for fractions of a cent.
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