The Bitcoin network is facing increased fees and a backlog of transactions due to the surge in block space demand caused by the BRC-20 memecoin minting on the BTC blockchain. Unlike conventional token standards, BRC-20 does not utilize smart contracts and operates only with wallets supporting the Bitcoin blockchain. This has led to a spike in the average fee per transaction, exceeding $16 and peaking at $29 on May 9. The total fees per block temporarily exceeded the block subsidy reward of 6.25 BTC for the first time since 2017, and there are currently 400,000 unconfirmed transactions pending on the network. Bitcoin core developers are considering taking action against BRC-20 tokens and Ordinals which they consider as network spam.
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