Coinbase Payout Count
Daily mean coinbase outputs per block. A mean flattens the spikes, so use a range of 1M or shorter to see them
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.
About this metric
Definition
How many outputs a block's coinbase transaction creates. Almost every block pays the reward to one address and reads 1.
A few read in the hundreds. Those are pools that settle with their miners inside the coinbase itself rather than sending a separate payout transaction, so one block pays everybody at once. Eligius did this from 2011 to 2017 and holds the record at 919 outputs in block 133,471; Ocean does it today.
How it is measured
Counts every output of the coinbase transaction, taken from the block itself rather than inferred from payout transactions.
The count includes outputs that are not payments. Since SegWit, almost every coinbase carries a commitment output, and some miners add an OP_RETURN of their own, so the baseline is one or two rather than one. A block whose coinbase creates 400 outputs is distributing to roughly 400 recipients, not exactly.
On a daily range this is the mean per block, which deliberately understates the peaks: a single 919-output block in a day of 144 contributes about 6.4 to that day's average. The spikes are only legible below the 5,000-block switch to per-block mode, which is a range of 1M or shorter.
Measured from my own Bitcoin node. Methodology