Governance ·
What the fee vote changed, one month later
Fees fell 12%, volume rose 9%, and validators still earn more than last year.
Rashid Osei
Research fellow · 5 min read
One month after OIP-38 cut the base fee by 12%, Oriel carries 9% more transactions a day, and validators earn more from fees than they did a year ago. The figures below compare the four weeks before the cut took effect on 22 July with the four weeks after.
The numbers
Fees fell by the full 12%, because almost nobody pays a priority tip at the current load. Volume rose 9%, more than the 5% my model expected. Most of the new traffic is small: transfers under $20 grew 14%, while transfers over $1,000 stayed flat.
Why validators still earn more
Against July, daily fee income fell about 4%, since the extra volume did not quite make up for the cut. Against August 2025 it is up 26%. A year ago the network carried 1.25 million transactions a day at $4.90 per 1,000, or about $6,100 in fees.
Fees are also the smaller part of what a validator earns. Staking rewards, still 4.8% a year, did not change with this vote.
What did not change
Blocks are 41% full on average, up from 37%, so there is plenty of room left. We saw no rise in spam: the share of transactions that fail or move no value stayed at 0.3%. Finality held at about 2.1 seconds through the whole period.
What I will watch next
- Whether volume keeps rising after the first month or settles back.
- Whether blocks pass 60% full at peak hours, when tips start to matter.
- How fee income compares with the same month last year, again in November.
If the next three months look like this one, I will propose a second cut of the same size. The model is in my paper on fee markets for small payments, published this month, and the data behind this post is on the research page.
