Largest Transaction
Largest transaction (per-block ranges only)
Short ranges plot one point per block, about one every ten minutes. Longer ranges plot one point per day, computed from every block in that day. How it is computed depends on the chart: some average, some total the day up, some are a ratio of the day's sums, and each chart says which. Either way a brief spike inside a day is smoothed away.
Not available at this range
This chart is computed per block. Pick 1M or shorter.
About this metric
Definition
The biggest single transaction in each block, by bytes.
Nothing caps a transaction at four megabytes directly. What consensus limits is weight: a block may carry 4,000,000 weight units, where an ordinary byte costs four units and a witness byte costs one. The same cap therefore allows about a megabyte of ordinary data or about four megabytes of witness data. A typical block is around half witness and lands near 1.6 MB, so a transaction that is almost entirely witness can approach four megabytes and still fit.
More than ninety blocks have gone above 3.9 MB, and they are not spread across the network: MARA mined more than nine in ten of them. Almost all carry an inscription, and forty-five left room for fewer than ten other transactions. The largest in the chain is 3,992,821 bytes, in block 839,842 on 2024-04-18. They began in February 2023 and are still happening.
How it is measured
Serialized size of the largest transaction in the block, read per transaction. Size rather than weight, so a witness-heavy transaction reads larger here than it costs against the limit.
Measured from my own Bitcoin node. Methodology