COURSE 06 · markets · 20 AUG
Bitcoin fee courses stack thinner as the mempool eases
Overnight fee ranks compressed into fewer courses. The mempool did not vanish — it stacked thinner, and the wall treated that as the file.
By Jonah Ives · Ladder writer · 2026-08-20
Bitcoin’s overnight fee ranks stacked thinner. That is the whole file. The mempool did not empty, and it did not spike into a pile of unpaid bricks. Median sat/vB sat in a tighter corridor than the prior session, and the next few blocks looked like a course you can set without shouting.
This wall does not treat a thin mempool as a victory. It treats it as masonry. A quiet course still has to be laid. Operators who watch the rank already know the difference between an empty hopper and a wall that simply needs fewer rows.
How the courses read
The trailing window of confirmed fees compressed. High and low ticks sat closer together. Replacement traffic stayed ordinary. Unconfirmed counts eased without collapsing into a gap that would make the next course look unfinished.
If the next session restacks the hopper, this wall will change the rank. Until then the note stays the same: the courses are thinner, the mortar still holds, and nobody had to climb the ladder just to get a block in.
A thinner stack is not a disappearing market. It is a shorter climb. Jonah Ives files that as a ladder step, not a score. The rank is the course you can still walk without raising the wall.