You don’t see that every day: Empty Bitcoin block found

Bitcoin is known for its robustness, security and predictability. Every 10 minutes – on average – the blockchain produces a new block, and the successful miner earns a block reward of 6.25 Bitcoin (BTC), around $130,000.

But every now and then the Bitcoin blockchain surprises observers and participants.

At block height 776,339, nodes across the network confirmed a completely empty block. The block was added to the Bitcoin blockchain with zero transactions included, causing some confusion among the crypto community. So, what exactly is a blank block and how does it happen?

First, while an empty block may seem strange at first, it is actually a normal occurrence on the network. The last time it happened was just over two weeks ago, in block 774,486.

Miners are motivated to mine blocks as quickly as possible, and sometimes they mine a block before they have received any transactions to be included. When this happens, the block remains empty.

The Bitcoin mempool, the place to analyze the Bitcoin blockchain, gives the following explanation: “When a new block is found, mining pools send miners a block template without transactions so they can start searching for the next block as soon as possible. They send a block template full of transactions right after, but a full block template is a larger data transfer and takes a bit longer to reach miners.”

“In this interim, which is usually no more than 1–2 seconds, miners sometimes get lucky and find a new block using the empty block template.”

Essentially, the miners “got lucky” by mining a template. In this case, the Bitcoin block at height 776,389 was added just seconds after its predecessor, 776,488. However, block 776,388 earned an extra 0.086 BTC or $1,854 in fees, which was added to the block reward of 6.25 BTC or $135,247.

Even if an empty block contains no transactions, the miner still receives the block reward of the newly minted Bitcoin. As such, block 776,389 was awarded 6.25 BTC – no transaction fees. Binance Pool was the winning miner, contributing as much as 12% to the total hash rate.

It is important to note that empty blocks are not a problem for the network. By mining empty blocks, miners still produce the coin generation transaction, also known as the coinbase transaction, which keeps Bitcoin steady on its way to reaching 21 million BTC issued.

Related: Public Miners Increase Bitcoin Production, Hash Rate In January

According to data from BitInfoCharts, the percentage of empty blocks on the network is usually around 1%–2%. The statistic is more surprising today, given the rise of Bitcoin “ordinals,” or the ability to permanently etch images, data, and stamps onto the blockchain.

The increase in order numbers has provoked some questions and even concern among the Bitcoin community, and the first cases of pornography were recently registered. The mempool has become increasingly busy and block space has been contested as some JPEG enthusiasts vie to contribute their art to the Bitcoin blockchain.