Recent OP_RETURN output statistics

The analysis of transactions on the blockchain between blocks 915800 (September 22, 2025) and 936000 (February 11, 2026) reveals significant insights into the use of OP_RETURN outputs. Throughout this period, there were 24,362,310 transactions featuring OP_RETURN outputs, with a slight discrepancy between this number and the count of individual OP_RETURN outputs, which stood at 24,363,011. This indicates that multiple OP_RETURN outputs in a single transaction were relatively rare, with only 61 transactions employing them. A notable example includes a transaction (927203:312) that contained 91 OP_RETURN outputs.

A deeper dive into the data uncovers that 396 transactions had OP_RETURN scriptPubKey sizes exceeding 83 bytes, with 42 of these transactions containing multiple outputs. One such transaction (925209:39) had a total of 1393 bytes across its outputs but only 66 bytes in its largest output. The distribution of OP_RETURN data sizes is skewed, with half of the transactions carrying less than 210 bytes of data, while the other half exceeds this figure. Notably, 10% of transactions contain more than 10kB of OP_RETURN data, highlighting a wide variance in usage patterns.

The volume of OP_RETURN data over the analyzed period amounted to 473,815,552 bytes. Transactions with large OP_RETURN payloads represented a mere 0.44% of the total usage by byte size, contrasting sharply with their 0.0016% share when measured by transaction count, indicating a disproportionate use of space by a small fraction of transactions.

Furthermore, the analysis identifies 34,283 transactions that burned satoshis through OP_RETURN outputs, totaling 1,463,488 satoshis. The largest burn recorded was in a transaction (931774:2482) that destroyed 69,630 satoshis. Interestingly, there was only one instance where a transaction both burned funds and contained more than 83 bytes of OP_RETURN data (930086:2470). Additionally, it's observed that there are 949,003 transactions with OP_RETURN data sizes ranging between 43 and 83 bytes, and a significant majority, 23,412,911 transactions, had OP_RETURN data of 42 bytes or less, adhering to the limit set by Knots prior to its release 29.2.