Bitcoin Network Congestion Leads to Unprecedented 8x Jump in Transaction Fees

The king coin, Bitcoin has been seeing a sudden surge in activity in the past couple of weeks. In fact, in just the past two weeks, the number of unconfirmed transactions on the Bitcoin network has skyrocketed from around 134,000 to nearly 450,000 causing a bottleneck in the mempool. This major spike translates to about a 3x jump in the number of transactions in a matter of just two weeks!

According to data sourced from Coinmetrics.io, this massive surge in unconfirmed transactions has resulted in a staggering 8x jump in transaction fees – that’s a near 700% jump in transaction fees between April 23, 2023 and May 8, 2023. Take a look at this chart below.

Read More: Bitcoin Price Prediction

Bitcoin Transaction Fees | Source: Coinmetrics.io

This surge in transactions on the Bitcoin network has also resulted in Bitcoin miners struggling to keep up with the demand and has also left many users frustrated and unable to complete their transactions in a timely manner.

As of writing this article, the Bitcoin Network is suffering from a major network clogging and traffic jam due to overwhelmingly high demand for transactions resulting in a very high number of unconfirmed transactions. Currently, according to data from mempool.space, a massive 442,000 transfers are currently stuck in the pipeline, unconfirmed.

Unconfirmed Transactions | Source: mempool.space

Memory usage on the platform has shot up to more than 3x the limit specified – currently at 1 GB, with a limitation of 300 MB – resulting in a backlog of over 440,000 unconfirmed transactions on the network.

Indications from the market indicate that the sudden surge in the network usage of Bitcoin can be attributed to the spike in the minting and transferring of Ordinal inscriptions and BRC20 tokens. The rise in interest in these has resulted in network flooding – where the Bitcoin blockchain network is now hosting over 13,000 BTC20 tokens and a massive 4.17 million Ordinals Inscriptions.

Bitcoin blocks take about 10 minutes per block to mine and to just clear the currently piling backlog of transactions – about 180 blocks would need to be mined which would take well over a day to fulfill.

Additional Read: Bitcoin Halving in 2024

Rising Controversy

This sudden spike in network congestion on Bitcoin has raised a lot of eyebrows and many people on Twitter are alluding to the possibility of a DDoS attack, by targeting the high transaction fees on the network and increasing that further by spamming the network. Another fact further fuelling the storm is that even block discovery time, which typically is about 10 minutes for the Bitcoin network has been hovering around 11 minutes as the network congestion situation continues to worsen.

If one were to check the crypto Twitter page for mempool, there are various users across the board who have been expressing their frustration in the matter. It is yet to be seen how the situation pans out and how the backlog of unconfirmed transactions that is piling up in the Bitcoin mempool is gradually completed and resolved.