What one Zcash transaction paid in fees, day by day. The lines are the mean and the 10th to 99th percentiles across every non-coinbase transaction.
Fees are shown in zatoshi, and 100,000,000 zatoshi make one ZEC. When the mean sits well above the median, a few heavy transactions pulled it up. The USD switch prices each day at that day’s ZEC close, never at today’s price.
The weekly and monthly switches average each percentile across the days in the period. For what the whole network paid, rather than what one transaction cost, see the Total Fees Paid chart. The node reports no fee field, so every fee here is worked out from the balance rule consensus enforces; the page explains how below the chart.
Zcash fees are quoted in zatoshi — 100,000,000 zat to one ZEC — because a typical fee is a few thousand of them. Denominating in ZEC would print a string of leading zeroes and tell you nothing.
Mean above median is the signal, not noise. ZIP-317 (a Zcash Improvement Proposal, the format Zcash uses for rule changes) prices a transaction by how many logical actions it contains. So a handful of many-action transactions in a day drags the mean up, while the median stays where an ordinary payment sits. When the two separate, the day had a few unusually heavy transactions; when they track, the day was uniform.
The node reports no fee field, so each fee here is derived from the same conservation identity consensus enforces: transparent inputs plus value released by any shielded bundle must equal transparent outputs plus value absorbed plus the fee. That makes these exact rather than estimated — and it is why a pool-migration transaction needs both bundles summed, since reading only the migrated amount would report it as an enormous fee.