A new snapshot of on-chain data highlights how far apart Bitcoin and Internet Computer sit on transaction costs. Per @Chainspect, $BTC averages $0.263 per transaction, while @dfinity's $ICP a
A new snapshot of on-chain data highlights how far apart Bitcoin and Internet Computer sit on transaction costs. Per @Chainspect, $BTC averages $0.263 per transaction, while @dfinity's $ICP averages $0.0000637. That is a difference of roughly 4,129x.
The figures move daily, but the gap is persistent. Chainspect's live comparison page recently showed Bitcoin's average fee at $0.2852 against $0.00009078 for ICP, a multiple of about 3,142x. The exact ratio shifts with network activity and token prices, but the order of magnitude has held.
Fees on $BTC and $ETH reflect a design choice. Both networks limit how much data and computation fit into each block, so users compete for scarce space. When demand rises, fees rise with it. That scarcity helps pay for network security, but it also makes small payments and frequent on-chain activity costly.
Bitcoin is built for a narrow purpose. According to a Spark comparison of the two networks, it is a base layer optimised for secure, censorship-resistant value transfer, with average throughput of around 7 transactions per second. The same page puts ICP at roughly 1,400 transactions per second for update calls.
Internet Computer takes a different approach to who pays. The network uses a reverse gas model, in which, according to the Internet Computer technical paper, canister developers pre-pay computation and storage costs in cycles obtained from $ICP. End users generally do not pay per-transaction fees in the way they do on Bitcoin or Ethereum.
That structure helps explain why the average fee recorded by Chainspect is a tiny fraction of a cent. It also means the headline comparison is not like for like. On Bitcoin, the fee is what a user pays to move value. On ICP, the figure reflects network costs that developers largely absorb.
Lower fees do not by themselves settle which network is more valuable. Chainspect's dashboard shows that Bitcoin's on-chain revenue and market capitalisation remain far larger than ICP's, and fee levels are only one measure of adoption and security.
Still, the data points to a clear divergence in design. Bitcoin and Ethereum protect scarce blockspace with higher fees, while compute-and-throughput chains such as Internet Computer have pushed costs down to a fraction of a cent. Which model wins developers and users over the long term is the open question.
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Chainspect: Bitcoin vs ICP comparison
