About Mempool & Ordinals

The Mempool & Ordinals Dashboard is a live diagnostic of the Bitcoin fee market and the metaprotocol activity that increasingly drives it. Streaming directly from mempool.space, it shows what is competing for the next blocks right now - ordinary payments, UTXO consolidations, and the inscription, BRC-20 and rune traffic that can crowd block space and lift fees network-wide. It is built for anyone deciding when and at what fee to transact, and for analysts tracking how ordinals demand bleeds into the broader fee economy. The suite spans five views. **Overview** leads with the OCM Signals strip - an Ordinals Heat Index (0 to 100), a Fee Dominance reading (the share of fees paid by metaprotocols versus payments), and a Mempool Congestion gauge expressed as a percentile against the last 30 days - alongside the projected next blocks, time since the last block with Poisson next-block odds, live fee tiles, and a feed of recent artifacts. **Mempool Flow** carries the depth chart and a fee-band treemap of the pending backlog, 2-hour to 1-month history, a best-time-to-transact hour-of-week heatmap in your local time, a 'Will my transaction confirm?' fee calculator, and an RBF (replace-by-fee) radar. **Block Space Economy** breaks down exactly what is consuming fees and weight. **Mining** covers pool dominance, hashrate, difficulty and the next retarget. **Ordinals & Runes** tracks inscription and rune counters, an artifact-mix stream, the biggest recent inscriptions, a rare-sat radar, and a click-through feed of individual artifacts. A core design principle is honesty about data provenance. Artifact counts, the Heat Index and Fee Dominance are derived from a live in-browser sample of mempool and freshly mined transactions, decoded client-side, and are labelled as such throughout. They are representative rather than exhaustive; where an ordinal indexer is connected, the dashboard switches the relevant readouts to verified network-wide totals.

Fee Environment Zones

Reading the Mempool

How It Works

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between 'sampled' and 'verified' figures?

Artifact counts, the Ordinals Heat Index and Fee Dominance are computed from a live sample of mempool and newly mined transactions decoded in your browser, so they are representative rather than a complete census of the network. Anything sample-derived is explicitly labelled 'sampled'. When an ordinal indexer (such as Best in Slot) is connected through the proxy, the relevant readouts switch to exhaustive network-wide totals and are labelled 'verified'.

What is the Ordinals Heat Index?

It is an OCM composite from 0 to 100 that gauges how hot metaprotocol activity is running. It blends the share of fees paid by ordinals and runes, their share of block space, the rate of rune mints and the sampled inscription rate into a single Cold-to-Scorching reading. The inputs are shown beneath the gauge, and it reads as '-' until enough fee data has been sampled, rather than falsely showing a cold market.

What does Fee Dominance measure?

Fee Dominance is the percentage of total mempool fees being paid by metaprotocol transactions - inscriptions, BRC-20, stamps and runes - as opposed to ordinary payments. A rising reading means inscription and rune demand is paying up for block space and pulling fees higher for everyone else.

How is Mempool Congestion turned into a percentile?

The current backlog (total pending virtual size) is ranked against roughly the last 30 days of mempool history from the statistics feed. A 70th-percentile reading means the backlog right now is heavier than 70% of the past month. Before that history loads, the gauge falls back to a fee-based estimate and shows the next-block fee rate instead of a percentile, so it never claims a percentile it does not have.

How does the best-time-to-transact heatmap work?

It buckets several months of mempool history by day of week and hour, in your local time, and shows the average backlog in each slot. Lighter slots are cheaper windows to send or consolidate. It is a historical pattern, not a forecast, but the weekly rhythm of network demand tends to be fairly persistent.

Why do the projected blocks keep changing?

The projected blocks are mempool.space's live estimate of how the next few blocks will be assembled from the current backlog, with their median fee and fee range. As new transactions arrive, others are replaced or confirmed, and miners actually mine, the projection updates continuously - which is exactly what makes it useful for choosing a fee right now.