Bitcoin activity nears record highs on microtransaction surge
Microtransactions below 0.01 Bitcoin (BTC) now account for roughly 80% of all daily transactions on the network, pushing transaction activity close to record highs despite weak price performance.The surge has pushed CryptoQuant’s Bitcoin “Network Activity Index” into positive territory for the first time since 2024, according to a Thursday report by the blockchain data company.Transactions below 0.01 BTC represented about 44% of all daily Bitcoin transactions in 2023, but their share has nearly doubled since then, fueled largely by Ordinals, Runes and other data-inscription protocols.The report, authored by CryptoQuant head of research Julio Moreno, said sustained growth in non-financial activity could “increase block space competition and raise fees for economic transactions.”“The economic value of these transactions is, however, disproportionately small,” Moreno wrote.Bitcoin’s network activity is 7% below its all-time high recorded in September 2024. Source: CryptoQuantBitcoin sees renewed inscription-driven congestionThe current congestion remains below the peaks seen during previous booms in Bitcoin inscriptions, when users embedded data such as images, text and token information directly on the blockchain.Transaction backlogs surged in 2023 as Ordinals and BRC-20 activity competed with ordinary transfers for block space, while another spike emerged in late 2024 following the launch of the Runes protocol.According to the report, Runes, Ordinals, BRC-20 tokens and data-timestamping services generate large volumes of low-value transactions, helping explain the sharp rise in microtransactions. OP_RETURN, an opcode that allows data to be embedded onchain without creating spendable outputs, has climbed to near-record usage levels in 2026. It split the Bitcoin community in 2025 after Bitcoin Core developers removed a long-standing 80-byte relay limit. Critics argued the change would make it easier to use Bitcoin for non-financial data storage.“The OP_RETURN opcode embeds up to 100,000 bytes of data onchain without creating spendable outputs, making it the standard mechanism for Bitcoin data-layer protocols,” Moreno wrote. These protocols generate high volumes of dust-value transactions (as low as 546 satoshis), directly explaining the low-value cohort surge.The trend has also pushed Bitcoin’s mempool, a holding area for unconfirmed transactions, to roughly 128,000 transactions, its highest transaction count since February 2025.
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