Cryptocurrencies are considered one of the most heated topics of discussion across the globe as it is experiencing numerous changes such as the drafting of laws and establishment of regulations for either secure implementation of the crypto ecosystem or banning the mining of crypto assets.
Amid this, the issues of high transaction fees and a congested backlog of transactions created a buzz on Twitter.
A Bitcoin quadrant of crypto Twitter mempool.space mentioned, there are currently over 469,000 transactions waiting to be confirmed in Bitcoin’s mempool. Before transactions are added to Bitcoin’s blockchain, transactions are sent to the network’s mempool, where they wait to be selected by a Bitcoin miner and inserted into Bitcoin’s next block. According to mempool.space Bitcoin transaction fees reached quite high, with high-priority transactions commanding a rate of 654 sat/vB, or around $26.
As claimed by a Twitter user @proffofjogi “High transaction fees are the chosen pain point by the attacker, probably to make […] Bitcoin unusable for smaller players.” Some users mentioned it as a product of nefarious behavior, aimed at cutting off those that couldn’t handle the uptick in transaction fees, while others pointed out that the network was jammed. According to Dylen Leclair the high transaction fee was an attack vector. He also coined that driving up costs in the short term has a negligible impact on Bitcoin in the long run.
The recent increase in inscriptions can be attributed to the growing popularity of BRC-20 tokens, which were originally pioneered as an experiment in March. Some exchanges like UniSat Wallet have created ways for people to trade these tokens built on top of Bitcoin, which bear a resemblance to ERC-20 tokens on Ethereum. BRC-20 is an experimental token standard on the Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain modeled on Ethereum’s ERC-20. It allows programmers to create and send fungible tokens via the Ordinals protocol. Although modeled after ERC-20, the BRC-20 token standard fundamentally differs from its Ethereum-based counterpart.
