A bitcoin block just neared a 2015 transaction record, but paid only $180 in fees

Updated Nov 9, 2026, 11:23 a.m. EST Published Nov 9, 2026, 11:19 a.m. EST

2 min read

Summary

AntPool mined Bitcoin’s second-busiest block on Saturday, packing in 11,255 transactions that generated only about $180 in fees.
Nearly all of AntPool’s roughly $237,000 payout came from Bitcoin’s fixed mining subsidy, while sampled transactions paid just one satoshi, or one hundred-millionth of a bitcoin, each.
The subsidy is projected to halve in 2028, and Saturday’s fees would cover less than 0.2 percent of the subsidy miners stand to lose.

Bitcoin’s second-busiest block ever came with fees worth less than $200.

AntPool mined block 974,961 on Saturday with 11,255 transactions, according to mempool.space data. That is 984 short of the 12,239 transactions F2Pool fit into block 367,853 on Aug. 1, 2015, a record figure for the network.

Together those transactions paid 240,533 satoshis in fees, about $180 at Sunday’s price near $75,800. A satoshi is one hundred-millionth of a bitcoin. AntPool’s total payout was about $237,000, nearly all of it the fixed 3.125 BTC subsidy the network mints for whoever finds a block.

It was the second such block in a week. On Nov. 4, AntPool’s block 974,557 carried 10,573 transactions and paid about $110 in fees.

Users bid for block space by paying a rate per virtual byte, the unit that measures how much room a transaction takes. mempool.space rounds the median rate in Saturday’s block to zero. A CoinDesk sample of transactions from the middle of the block, using mempool.space data, showed a run of 80-byte transactions, each paying a single satoshi and carrying a small data output.

That rate sits below the relay floor Bitcoin Core 29.1 set by default last year, a tenth of a satoshi per virtual byte. The floor is a node policy, not a network rule, so blocks containing cheaper transactions remain valid. The public data does not show how the transactions reached AntPool.

The 2015 record block paid 0.22582926 BTC in fees, about 94 times what AntPool collected on Saturday. With bitcoin trading near $285 that day, according to CoinMarketCap data, those fees were worth about $64, while the 25 BTC subsidy of the time came to about $7,100.

Miners currently earn about $32 per petahash per day, according to Hashrate Index. Mining difficulty, which sets how hard a block is to find, is projected to fall about 4% around Nov. 13, per mempool.space, after rises of 5.92% on Oct. 16 and 5.54% on Oct. 29.

The subsidy halves to 1.5625 BTC at block 1,050,000, projected for around April 2028. Saturday’s fees would replace less than two-tenths of 1% of the subsidy miners stand to lose at that halving.

Originally published at https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2026/11/09/a-bitcoin-block-just-neared-a-2015-transaction-record-but-paid-only-usd180-in-fees.