The chain is on sale

2 September 2026 · Block 965,182 · Dubai

Every number in this brief was generated from our own Bitcoin node — bitcoind, Fulcrum, and mempool running on hardware we control. No third-party data vendors. You can verify all of it against your own node.

The Week in Numbers

Metric	Value
Price	$77,106 · AED 283,172
Blocks mined (7d)	1,027
Fee to confirm next block	3 sat/vB (economy: 1)
Weekly median block fee	1 sat/vB
Mempool backlog	34,680 tx · 26.5 vMB
Hashrate	912 EH/s (+0.8% vs 30-day avg)
Next difficulty adjustment	est. +0.74% around Sat 6 Sep
Miner revenue (7d)	3,169.6 BTC — 99.38% subsidy, 0.62% fees

Fee & Mempool Read: the chain is on sale

The fee market spent the entire week on the floor. The median fee paid across all 1,027 blocks was 1 sat/vB — the minimum relay rate. Even the 90th percentile of a typical block sat at 3 sat/vB, and the spikiest block of the week topped out at 11. The mempool holds 26.5 vMB of transactions, but nearly all of it is 1 sat/vB paste that miners will chew through whenever demand pauses.

What to do with this: this is a consolidation window. If you've been stacking on a DCA schedule, you're accumulating UTXOs — dozens or hundreds of small outputs that will cost real money to spend if fees return to 50+ sat/vB. Consolidating them into a few outputs today costs almost nothing. The same logic applies to setting up or rebalancing a multisig, sweeping old wallets, or opening Lightning channels. Blockspace at 1 sat/vB is not a permanent state; historically these windows close without notice.

(How to consolidate safely — including the privacy trade-offs of merging UTXOs — is a topic for a future issue.)

Mining & Security: maximum hashrate, minimum fees

Hashrate holds near record levels at 912 EH/s, and difficulty is about to tick up another 0.74% on Saturday after last epoch's -1.31% breather. Blocks ran slightly fast this week (9m 56s against the 10-minute target — which is exactly why the adjustment is positive).

The tension worth watching: miners earned 3,169.6 BTC this week and only 19.6 BTC of it came from fees — 0.62%. At $77k, the network's security budget is running almost entirely on the 3.125 BTC subsidy, with the next halving (to 1.5625 BTC) roughly 19 months away. Record hashrate competing for subsidy-only revenue is a margin squeeze on inefficient miners; watch for hashrate softness if price stays here.

Pool concentration remains the uncomfortable chart nobody looks at: Foundry USA (26.2%), AntPool (18.3%) and F2Pool (14.8%) — 59.3% of blocks between three coordinators this week. Pool ≠ owner of the hashrate, and miners can switch — but block-template control is this concentrated today.

The UAE Angle

At AED 283,172 per coin, an AED 1,000 monthly DCA currently buys ~353k sats. For UAE stackers the fee floor matters more than usual: most local exchange withdrawals are on-chain (among VARA-licensed platforms only OKX offers native Lightning withdrawals, and with per-transaction caps), so most withdrawals you take to self-custody right now settles for under a dirham in network fees. If you've been leaving a balance on an exchange "until fees make withdrawal worth it" — this is that moment, and it costs less than a karak.

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Generated from our own node at block 965,182 · 2 Sep 2026, 18:46 GST.