Bitcoin circulating supply has increased to 20.05 million BTC, putting 95.47 percent of the total issuance of 21 million BTC into the market.

U.Today, a blockchain media outlet, reported on Sunday that about 950,000 BTC remain to be issued.

Bitcoin’s remaining supply is not structured to enter the market all at once. Bitcoin has a halving structure in which block rewards are cut in half about every four years. The remaining 950,000 BTC is expected to be issued gradually over more than 100 years. The current pace of new bitcoin issuance is about 3.125 BTC every 10 minutes, and this figure falls further after the next halving expected in 2028.

Market attention is focused on how the network will be maintained after the last bitcoin is mined. Binance, in a recent post on X, formerly Twitter, and in an Academy article, presented the timing of the last bitcoin being mined as around 2140 and explained that miners would then rely entirely on transaction fees rather than new coin issuance.

Miners’ revenue is currently made up of two pillars: block rewards and user transaction fees. But when the last bitcoin is mined around 2140, block rewards will no longer be paid. Binance pointed out that miners at that time would have to cover both operating costs and profits with transaction fees.

The halving schedule is also drawing renewed attention. With fewer than 100,000 blocks left until the next bitcoin halving, the number of blocks remaining stands at 90,995 based on the OKLink explorer. That means bitcoin has already passed more than half of the interval to the next halving.

On the schedule, the next halving is presented as around mid-April 2028, and when it arrives the block reward falls to 1.5625 BTC. As the pace of new supply reduction accelerates further, the bitcoin network will face, over the long term, both issuance contraction and a shift to a fee-centred revenue structure at the same time.

This shift does not mean the bitcoin network will stop. Bitcoin was designed so that once new issuance reaches a certain level, miner rewards switch to being centred on transaction fees. When users offer transaction fees, miners secure revenue by prioritising transactions with higher fees for inclusion in blocks.

Even so, over the long term, the key question is whether transaction fees alone can sustain sufficient mining participation. If fee income falls short of electricity costs and equipment operating costs, some miners could exit the market and the hashrate, the network’s computing power, could fall. Bitcoin adjusts mining difficulty at regular intervals to maintain block production speed, but an analysis says whether enough computing power will continue to be maintained to underpin network security will depend on future transaction demand and growth in the fee market.

Halvings and the path to 2140 Why the supply cap is central to Bitcoin’s design and what changes once new BTC stops being minted. Read more https://t.co/TB2P8crdzp