Bitcoin and Ethereum fees follow a weekly pattern, lowest in the small hours of Sunday morning in European time and highest on weekday afternoons when Europe and North America are both awake, and a deposit sent in the trough costs a fifth to a tenth of the same deposit sent at the peak. The pattern comes from when exchanges, businesses and people move money, and it is regular enough to plan around. The trick is to fund the table in the trough and let the balance sit on the ledger, where spins cost nothing, until you want to play.
The schedule below is the weekly cycle as it has run for the past few years, given in UK time, with typical Bitcoin next-block rates for a normal week. Ethereum’s base fee follows the same shape. Litecoin, Tron, Solana, and the layer 2 networks are flat enough that timing does not matter, so the schedule is for players funding roulette games with crypto, with Bitcoin or Ether on the main chain.
- Saturday, midnight to 8 am – Trough. Rates of 1 to 5 satoshis per byte. The cheapest window of the week and the best time to deposit a bankroll for the days ahead.
- Saturday, 8 am to 6 pm – Low. Rates of 3 to 10. Still cheap, with occasional short spikes when Asian markets open.
- Saturday evening to Sunday, 8 am – Through again. Rates of 1 to 5. The second-best window, and often the quietest of all, is in the hours around dawn on Sunday.
- Sunday, 8 am to midnight – Low, rising towards the evening as Monday begins in Asia. Rates of 3 to 15.
- Monday to Friday
- midnight to 7 am – Low to medium. Rates of 5 to 20. Asian trading is active, but Europe and America are asleep.
- 7 am to 1 pm – Medium. Rates of 10 to 30 as Europe starts work and exchanges process the overnight queue.
- 1 pm to 9 pm – Peak. Rates of 20 to 60 on a normal week, with the worst hour usually between 2 pm and 5 pm when American markets open on top of European afternoon activity. Deposits sent now pay the most and wait the longest.
- 9 pm to midnight – Falling. Rates of 10 to 25 as America winds down.
Four events break the pattern, and each pushes rates far above the weekday peak for hours or days:
- Sharp price moves – A move of ten per cent or more in either direction fills the queue with exchange deposits and withdrawals. Rates of 100 or more are common for the following six to twelve hours.
- Large token or inscription launches – On Ethereum, a popular token launch, and on Bitcoin, a wave of inscription activity, can hold rates high for days regardless of the hour.
- Exchange incidents – When a large exchange halts withdrawals or reports trouble, users move coins off every exchange at once, and the queue fills within the hour.
- Month and quarter ends – Settlements and fund movements cluster in the last two days of a month, lifting weekday rates a step above normal.
The routine that follows from the schedule is short. Deposit on Saturday or Sunday morning for the week ahead. Play whenever you like, since the ledger charges nothing per spin. Withdraw in a trough, too, or over the Lightning Network, where the cycle does not apply. And before any main-chain send, glance at a mempool viewer, because one of the four events above can turn a Sunday dawn into a weekday afternoon without warning.
