Bitcoin batching remains consistent even as transaction fees rise

Bitcoin’s system enables users to send multiple payments in a single transaction by leveraging the sendmany remote procedure call. This feature calls on the Bitcoin Core software to create and broadcast a single transaction that sends outputs to multiple addresses. More commonly known as “payment batching,” the feature helps reduce the number of individual transactions created by the sender and the transaction fees they have to pay.

With the recent uptick in bitcoin’s transaction fees and overall price, we decided to take a look at whether Bitcoin users are batching. We will use the payments metric devised by the team at transactionfee.info for our analysis. The payments metric is calculated by counting the number of outputs per transaction and subtracting the change output. The change output is returned to the original sender of a transaction when the value of output is higher than the intended transaction — i.e. a user sending $20 worth of bitcoin outputs for a $12 item, will receive $8 worth of bitcoin outputs back in change. As such, change outputs should not be counted towards economic activity.