Bitcoin’s User Base: A Ghost Town or Hidden Boom?

Is Bitcoin really fading into obscurity—or are we just looking in the wrong places?

The 'Empty Network' Narrative

Crypto skeptics point to dwindling active addresses as proof of Bitcoin's irrelevance. But dig deeper—institutional custody solutions and layer-2 adoption might be skewing the metrics.

Wall Street's Silent Takeover

While retail traders chase memecoins, BlackRock's BTC ETF now holds more coins than MicroStrategy. The 'users' aren't gone—they've just been replaced by trillion-dollar balance sheets.

The On-Chain Reality Check

True, NFT degens and DeFi farmers abandoned BTC for flashier chains years ago. But store-of-value doesn't need viral adoption—just a vault and diamond hands.

Funny how the same finance bros who called Bitcoin 'dead' in 2018 are now quietly allocating 2% of their portfolio 'for diversification.'

In Brief

• Bitcoin’s mempool is nearly empty, with far fewer transactions than during previous price highs.
• Experts say this signals low retail activity and weak on-chain demand despite BTC trading above $100,000.
• Some warn it could point to a deeper issue with network sustainability and long-term miner incentives.

What the mempool drought means

The mempool is often seen as a real-time barometer of Bitcoin network usage. When demand is high, the mempool is full of pending transactions, and fees spike. When it’s quiet, it means few people are using Bitcoin to send funds or interact with on-chain services.

Joël Valenzuela, a longtime bitcoin advocate and marketer, sees the current mempool levels as a serious red flag.

Bitcoin's mempool (queue of transactions waiting to be processed) is almost completely empty. The percentage of miner revenue coming from fees (instead of inflation) is down to a fraction of a percent. 😱

Simply put, almost all of Bitcoin's actual users have gone away. At… pic.twitter.com/Kbk3j1e8c1

He warns that this could point to a crisis: a network with high valuation but no functional economy behind it. In his view, the lack of fee-based miner incentives could eventually push Bitcoin toward custodial control by institutions or governments.

What this says about retail

Joao Wedson, founder of analytics firm Alphractal, offers a different interpretation, one focused on user demographics. To him, the empty mempool is evidence that retail traders are largely absent.

When Mempool transactions begin to rise again, it’s a clear sign that retail is back — because the growing backlog reflects increased demand for using the network. Right now, activity is low and the Mempool is almost empty.

This mismatch between price and usage has become more visible since March 2025, when mempool levels began hovering between 3,000 and 30,000 transactions, well below historical norms during bullish periods.

Price rises while network remains quiet

Bitcoin’s price strength appears to be driven more by institutional accumulation, ETFs, and speculative derivatives than grassroots activity. While that’s not inherently bad, it raises questions about the health of Bitcoin’s decentralized, user-driven foundation.

Miner revenue is overwhelmingly reliant on block subsidies, the new Bitcoin issued with each block. But as the halving cycle continues and those subsidies shrink, transaction fees are supposed to fill the gap. If network activity doesn’t rise to meet that shift, it could create a sustainability issue for Bitcoin’s security model.

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