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Fee Rate

What Is The Fee Rate?

What Is The Fee Rate?

The fee rate for a Bitcoin transaction is the number of sats a sender is willing to pay for each byte of on-chain transaction data.

sats/vbyte

The fee rate is commonly expressed in sats/vbyte. Sats, short for satoshis, the smallest unit of a Bitcoin, and vbyte is a unit of virtual size.

Bitcoin miners are paid fees in proportion to the size of the transaction in vbytes. For example, if someone sends a transaction with a fee rate of 10 sats/vbyte and the transaction is 200 vbytes, they will pay 2,000 sats as a fee.

On-chain fees are paid by the sender of a transaction and go to the miners who confirm it. When sending Bitcoin, you can choose your own fee rate. Paying a higher rate results in faster confirmation times and lower rate results in slower confirmation times.

Rates fluctuate depending on network conditions. During times of high network usage, fees naturally increase. If you are not in a hurry to have your transaction confirmed, you can choose a lower rate and save money on fees. However, be aware that very low rates may result in your transaction taking a long time to confirm or even being dropped from the mempool.

Transaction Fee Estimator

A fee rate estimator is a tool that allows you to estimate the fee you need to pay in order for your transaction to be confirmed within a certain number of blocks. The fee estimator takes into account the current state of the network, including the number of transactions in the mempool and the size of each transaction. Based on this information, it calculates an estimated rate that is required for your transaction to be included in the next block.

Using a fee rate estimator can be a helpful tool when deciding how high of a fee to pay, as it can help you ensure that your transaction will be confirmed in a timely manner.

Increasing The Fee Rate

If a transaction is taking too long to confirm, it’s possible to use one of the transaction feefee bumping methods to increase the fee after it has initially been sent. Fees can be increased from either the sender side or the receiver side but each uses a different fee bumping method.

If a sender would like the transaction confirmed in less time, they can use replace by fee (RBF) to increase the fee by creating a new transaction with an increased fee rate. The increased fee will be deducted from one of the inputs.

If any of the recipients in an unconfirmed transaction would like the transaction confirmed sooner, they can use child pays for parent (CPFP) to increase the fee.