Sending XBT costs about a penny right now
Sending XBT costs about a penny right now, often less. In the last 24 hours, 29,044 transactions paid a combined 0.414 XBT in fees, about $308 at today's price. That works out to roughly 1,400 sats, or about one cent, per transaction.
What a simple payment costs
Fee estimates are sitting at the floor: 1 sat per vbyte for fast, half-hour and economy alike. A basic one-input, two-output payment is about 141 vbytes, so it costs about 141 sats. At $744 per XBT, that is about a tenth of a cent. The average is higher because some transactions are much larger, like big consolidations.
Why fees are so low
- Blocks aren't full. Recent blocks have run about 0.2 to 0.6 MB, well under the limit, so there is little competition for space.
- Blocks are fast. With blocks arriving every 8 to 9 minutes ahead of this weekend's difficulty jump, space clears quickly.
- Much of the traffic is copied. Most XBT transactions are replays of Bitcoin transactions, which carry the fee rates they paid on Bitcoin.
The other side: miners live on the subsidy
Fees were about 0.09% of miner income in the last day. The other 99.9% was the 3.125 XBT block subsidy, about 450 XBT a day. That is normal for a young chain, and it means mining security depends almost entirely on price and subsidy for now. The next halving, to 1.5625 XBT, is 72,768 blocks away, a little under a year and a half at 10-minute blocks.
Tips
- Don't overpay. Most wallets let you set 1 sat/vB by hand, and it confirms fine today.
- If a wallet suggests a much higher fee, check it against the live estimate on xbt.live.
- Low fees are a good time to consolidate many small UTXOs into one.
Data from XBT block explorers via xbt.live, as of Oct 14, 2026. Not financial advice.
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