The on-chain Bitcoin transaction fees have left opinions divided since the price required to send BTC has reached new highs. Statistics resource firm data claims that the transaction fee on average stands at approximately $40 on December 17th. Recently, another Bitcoin Ordinals wave was inscribed. This has caused every user on every network to experience increased transaction fees. At this point, some users are of the opinion that it will stay as such.
As per the resource, the cost of sending BTC on-chain is slightly more than $37 at this point. This is the highest average cost since April 2021. Additional analytics data indicates that the mempool of Bitcoin (the unconfirmed backlog size of on-chain transactions) is extremely large. As such, this has caused transactions that have fees attached of as high as $2 to not have any priority on-chain. When this article is being written, the number of transactions queued for approval stands at about 350,000.
A Big Concern Over Bitcoin Fees
The current rise in price leads several smaller investors to consider casual on-chain spending as unviable. As such, Bitcoin proponents continue to carry on their heated debate regarding the subject. Several are furious over how much impact Ordinals are having when it comes to fees. However, popular figures in the Bitcoin community believe that transaction costs that have double digits are nothing more than a small indicator of what is approaching.
As such, any investor who wants to protect themselves from this increase has to get on the solutions of Layer 2. This includes “the Lightning Network”. It is designed particularly with mass adoption in mind. Hodlonaut described in one of his X posts that, at this point, the fees are temporarily and artificially high because of JPEG clownery.
