Bitcoin network falls into a volume trough, raising concerns in the ecosystem

Although the price of Bitcoin remains high at $105,000, its underlying network is quietly undergoing a crisis. On June 9, 2025, the Bitcoin blockchain reached a concerning milestone — the seven-day moving average trading volume plummeted to 317,000 transactions, setting a new low for nearly two years. This liquidity crisis not only exposed the vulnerabilities in the miners' revenue model but also sparked intense debates within the Bitcoin community regarding the future direction of the network.

On-chain activity plummets: ecological alarm behind the data

Blockchain data platform monitoring shows that the seven-day moving average transaction volume of the Bitcoin network fell to about 317,000 transactions on Friday, marking the lowest value since October 2023. At that time, the figure had dropped to a low of 269,000 transactions. Notably, this decline in transaction volume exhibits multiple signs of stagnation: the number of active addresses fell below 942,000, the unconfirmed transaction mempool inventory plummeted by 99% to 3,000 transactions, and the median transaction fee dropped below 1 sat/vB (approximately $0.00001).

The miner economic model is facing dual pressures. Data shows that the daily average fee income across the network has sharply dropped from $4.7 million in October 2024 to $593,000, with the proportion of fees in miners' revenue structure falling below the dangerous level of 2%. In a private channel operated by a mining pool, there have even been ultra-low fee transactions with a fee of only $0.01 that have been delayed for 30 days, and this "loss-making packaging" behavior reveals the deep crisis of excess mining power.

Clash of Technical Philosophies: Anti-Censorship Principle vs. Network Purification Theory

On June 6th, a "Decentralization Manifesto" co-signed by 31 Bitcoin core developers sparked heated discussions in the community. This document, regarded as the "Blockchain Human Rights Act", states: "The behavior of nodes filtering low-fee transactions essentially establishes new censorship checkpoints." A well-known developer emphasized in a technical forum that the core value of Bitcoin lies in its censorship resistance, even if it means tolerating certain controversial use cases.

Opposition voices come from some pragmatists. They stated publicly: "Allowing junk transactions below 1 sat/vB is like letting bicycles occupy the highway." The technical faction pointed out that a flood of transactions triggered by a certain protocol in 2024 caused transaction fees to soar 300 times, and now, after the protocol's usage has plummeted by 98%, the network urgently needs to establish anti-abuse mechanisms. This debate essentially reflects the ideological struggle between Bitcoin's dual identity as a "store of value" and a "payment network."

Evolution of Miner's Survival Rules: Dark Pool Trading and Hash Rate Competition

In the face of an average of 346,000 transactions per day in the "Hunger Games", leading mining companies are beginning to explore unconventional survival strategies. The exposure of a private channel under a large mining company has revealed the existence of "dark pool trading" among miners. This transaction model, which bypasses the public memory pool for direct packaging, provides miners with a stable cash flow but also effectively makes block producers the "gatekeepers" on the chain.

A 0.1 sat/vB ultra-low fee transaction experiment personally planned by a founder of a mempool platform was packaged by miners after being stuck for 30 days. This art-like experiment revealed two brutal realities:

1. The current network bandwidth utilization is below 40%, and miners are forced to accept transactions with extremely low fees;

2. Although technical upgrades such as Segregated Witness (SegWit) have increased the volume of transactions that can be accommodated in a single block, they have actually exacerbated the issue of excess computing power.

Future Projection: Ecological Reconstruction Under the Ice Layer

This liquidity crisis may become an important turning point in the development of Bitcoin. The miner community may accelerate the transition to an energy arbitrage model, utilizing seasonal low-cost electricity to absorb excess hash power; the developer community may promote upgrades to the UTXO management protocol, improving on-chain efficiency through techniques such as batch transactions; meanwhile, institutional investors' focus is shifting from purely the fluctuations in coin price to overall network health indicators.

In this silent war of computational power, each participant is redefining the value boundaries of Bitcoin. When the founder of Ethereum mentioned in a recent interview that "Bitcoin needs its own ZK-Rollups," this 16-year-old decentralized experiment stands at the crossroads of technological revolution and ideological adherence. Perhaps, as stated in the Bitcoin whitepaper: "The robustness of the system lies not in perfection, but in the tolerance of imperfection."