A month and a half ago, the price of a simple transfer was under 50 cents, despite the record-high number of transactions. We gave a detailed explanation of the causes of this phenomenon in our previous article.
Image source: bitinfocharts.com
The number of transactions has now returned to the same level, but the commission for a simple transfer has increased 16-fold.
Image source: mempool.space
The reason for this lies both in the increased number of those wishing to buy/exchange Bitcoin and in renewed interest in Ordinals.
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Ordinals are now essentially represented by JSON text messages, which are quasi-tokens. This is similar to ERC-20 in the Ethereum network. If Shiba Inu stands out among these in Ethereum's network, for the Bitcoin network, those would be ORDI or PEPE.
Image source: StormGain.com
Text ordinals don't take up much space in a block. As a result, in early autumn, the large volume of transactions didn't result in a higher commission. The ordinals were well interspersed between ordinary transfers, taking only unused space. Now, after a surge of interest in Bitcoin, the demand for both the former and the latter has increased. Binance played an important role in the hype by listing ORDI.
The network's average fee is already more than $10 and will continue to grow as some market participants are growing interest in quasi-tokens. The creator of the Ordinals protocol, Casey Rodarmore, previously apologised to users for the innovation, calling 99.9% of quasi-tokens spam.
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The only benefit that the traditional Bitcoin community sees in the spread of ordinals is higher earnings for miners.
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Due to the high network load, users increase the fee amount to have their transactions included in the blockchain as soon as possible. The revenue for processing transactions jumped in November from 4% to 17% of the block mining fee.
StormGain Analytical Group
(platform for trading, exchanging and storing cryptocurrency)