We build transactionfee.info in 2018 to raise awareness about the inefficient use of block space by exchanges, services, and wallets. The project is a joint effort with Bitrefill CEO @ziggamon.

In early 2018 the price of bitcoin surged to 20.000 USD. At that time we saw more than 400.000 daily transactions on the Bitcoin network which caused a steep increase in transaction fees. A lot of exchanges, services and wallets did not use the block space efficiently. We build transactionfee.info to raise community awareness.

Only a few exchanges and services made use of payment batching or spend SegWit outputs in 2018. This meant, for example, that every withdrawal was costly for exchanges as the withdrawal transaction takes up a lot of space in the blockchain. Often the transaction fees or even a higher fixed fee was deducted from the user’s withdrawal amount. Our site allowed users to check the fee efficiency of their transactions and their wallets. It calculated how much fees could have been saved by using, for example, payment batching or by spending SegWit outputs. Green checkmarks for fee- and space-saving behavior and red crosses for inefficient and wasteful behavior.

Later, we added a subsection with charts about payment and feerate metrics to the site. We offered all data under a CC0 “No Rights Reserved” license. The transactionfee.info website has appeared in numerous online news articles since then, one, for example, being thenextweb.com: Bitcoin’s median transaction fee lowest since 2011 — nearing BCH. The transactionfee.info data even made its way into academia.

Due to low usage of the fee efficiency checker over 2019 and us reaching our goal to raise awareness we decided to overhaul the site and released a second iteration in 2020.