Bitcoin fees finally low again. Yet xchain tells optimal counterparty fee is $4.29.
Why so expensive? Counterparty uses Bitcoin yes?
1.) Those are the fees to use the Bitcoin network… not counterparty specific.
2.) Those fees are per-kilobyte… and most counterparty transactions are considerably smaller than 1kb.
3.) A typical Counterparty send transaction takes up about 250bytes… so about 1/4 of the above fee.
4.) The fees vary based on how many transactions are pending… more pending transactions means higher fees.
So… you could still send a counterparty transaction for around $0.05 if you were willing to wait a few blocks for your transaction to get processed and included in a block.
FYI… I am working on a desktop client which should hopefully make the fees much easier to understand 
View the current fee situation on
Unfortunately, the priority fee calculation is pretty stupid (it’s from within the Bitcoin client, I think). If you look closely at the graph you will find that the priority fee overshoots significantly. I’ve always had my transactions included in the first block with regular fee, and I guess there’s only a tiny risk mempool will fill up with higher fee txs before the next block is found, in which case I’d have to wait one more block.