The share of transaction fees in the total income of bitcoin miners has dropped to seven tenths of a percent and has not exceeded one percent for almost a year. Rafael Schulze-Kraft, co-founder of the Glassnode analytical platform, drew attention to the fact that such low indicators were last recorded in December 2000. At that time, the exchange rate of the first cryptocurrency did not exceed four hundred dollars. July 2000 was the least profitable month for crypto miners in almost three years. The total income of the miners amounted to just over eight hundred and five million dollars, which is the lowest since September 2000. Of this impressive amount, only five and a half million accounted for user fees. For comparison, three years ago the total income was slightly lower, but the share of commissions reached three and a half percent.

Miners' earnings traditionally consist of two main components, including transaction fees and a fixed reward for the extracted block. The current reward is a payout of three whole and one hundred twenty-five thousandths of bitcoin for each block added to the network. The next planned halving of this award is scheduled for the spring of 2017. The steady drop in fees directly reflects a noticeable decrease in overall activity on the network of the first cryptocurrency. Users conduct fewer transactions, which significantly reduces the demand for prioritizing transactions in blocks. Analysts at JPMorgan, a large financial holding company, previously noted that more and more miners are working near the profitability threshold. The bank's experts consider about twenty percent of all crypto miners to be unprofitable, estimating the average cost of mining one bitcoin at seventy-eight thousand dollars.

Against the background of declining profitability of traditional mining, the largest market players began to actively develop the area of computing support for artificial intelligence. Keel Infrastructure has completely shut down all of its mining farms in the United States, retrofitting data centers to meet new technological needs. Riot Platforms Corporation has signed a large-scale twenty-year contract for the provision of computing power with the developer of the neural network Claude. The amount of this long-term agreement has exceeded nine billion dollars. The trend towards business transformation was also confirmed by the experts of the investment company VanEck. In their opinion, in the coming years, the key factor in evaluating mining companies will be the ability to develop infrastructure for AI. Fred Thiel, CEO of MARA Holdings, previously acknowledged the sale of more than twenty thousand bitcoins from the company's reserve. The head explained this step by the need to service debts and actively develop modern data centers for artificial intelligence.

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The material has been prepared solely for informational purposes and does not constitute financial advice or recommendation.