This contrasts starkly with the latter quarter of last year, when rising fees peaked at $34. There's a primary reason why fees have been dropping since then: with bitcoin too expensive to send, people simply stopped using it as currency.

Bitcoin Fees Take a Tumble

It's not just the USD/BTC market that oscillates: bitcoin's fee market follows suit. Due to various factors ranging from network usage to Segwit adoption and hashrate, fees can rise and fall significantly. Throughout 2017, that trajectory was largely an upward one, culminating, in December, with fees becoming infeasible. Transaction fees have been mercifully declining since then, hitting an 18-month low as of February 21, but given that daily transaction volume has halved in the same period, that's not surprising. A standard six-block transaction can now be pushed through for as little as 15 cents. Bitinfocharts calculates a median fee of 52 cents, versus just over 1 cent for bitcoin cash.