The trend seems to be for Bitcoin network fees to increase in the future, NFT or not.
The average size of blocks added daily to the Bitcoin Blockchain is currently around 2MB, the highest level in the cryptocurrency’s history, according to data from OKLink.
On Sunday February 5, for the first time the average size of the blocks exceeded the level of 2 MB, a number that represents double the usual average size of Bitcoin blocks, which are usually around 1 MB.
This new trend of full blocks continues this Tuesday, with on-chain analysts trying to understand what is happening in the cryptocurrency network with the highest market value.
The Chaincode Labs engineer, known by the pseudonym Murch, tweeted this Tuesday morning that the Bitcoin mempool is currently at a depth of 51 blocks.
The mempool is a kind of “tank” where users’ BTC transactions wait to be collected by a miner and added to a block. It turns out that the demand on the network is so high that it is creating queues in the mempool, and causing blocks to be added closer and closer to their maximum capacity.
Since the Bitcoin Blockchain is scheduled to add a new block every ten minutes, the queue of transactions waiting for validation only grows. As Murch pointed out, it’s been over 47 hours since the Bitcoin mempool faced a block queue.
What is Filling Bitcoin Blocks about?
The increase in demand for Bitcoin block space does not represent organic growth in user activity on the network. Actually, a single project occupies most of the blocks: The Ordinals protocol.
Ordinals allow non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to be stored on the Bitcoin Blockchain by writing metadata to satoshi units that give them individual identities, and enable their tracking and transfer.
As MB (Bitcoin Market) data scientist Breno Brito explains, Ordinals resembles the old Colored Coins experiment, but advances in its application thanks to updates that have been implemented in Bitcoin over the years, such as Segregated Witness. (Segwit) in 2017 and Taproot in 2021.
Are Bitcoin NFTs a Good Idea?
Thanks to Taproot, creating a Bitcoin NFT is not an expensive operation. However, this does not mean that NFTs will not cause network fees to rise, especially if they continue to take up more and more space within blocks.
“NFT content competes for limited space with other transactions, so yes, the fees tend to increase with the dispute,” explains developer Narcélio Filho. For him, this rise in rates helps to attract more miners to the network, which consequently increases the security of the entire ecosystem.
Breno Brito, Bitcoin Market Data Scientist, argues that the trend is for Bitcoin network fees to increase in the future, NFT or not.
“Everyone knows that the bitcoin transaction fee is going to have to go up at some point. Block rewards will continue to fall over the years due to the halving, so there will come a time when miners will demand higher transaction fees to continue profitable operation,” he explains.
By Audy Castaneda
