The mean fee to conduct a transaction on the Bitcoin network just shot to its highest level in nearly two years, as per data presented by crypto on-chain analytics firm Glassnode.
On Friday, the average transaction fee clocked in at 0.00032814 BTC, up more than ten-fold from a dip to 0.00003161 on the 23rd of April.
At the current Bitcoin price of around $29,600, that implies a transaction fee of nearly $10.
That’s a more than 10x rise versus the average transaction price of under $1.0 on the 23rd of April (when the Bitcoin price was hovering in the low-$27,000s).
Analysts have attributed the spike in network fees to a renewed meme coin craze (PEPE and other smaller meme coin rivals like SPONGE have been posting exponential gains in recent sessions) that has ignited a surge in transactions relating to so-called BRC-20 tokens.
Having taken its inspiration from the highly successful ecosystem of ERC-20 crypto tokens that exist on the Ethereum blockchain, the experimental new BRC-20 token standard has been taking Bitcoin by storm since its launch in March.
The standard allows users to issue and transfer fungible tokens via the Bitcoin blockchain.
The BRC-20 craze hasn’t just triggered a jump in network fees.
Daily Bitcoin transactions hit an all-time high of around 680,000 earlier this week.
Meanwhile, higher fees are bringing Bitcoin miners online.
Earlier this week, the Bitcoin network’s hash rate hit an all-time high level of nearly 440 Exahashes per second.
And the growing BRC-20 craze seems to be bringing new users to the network.
Addresses with a non-zero BTC balance just hit a new record high above 46 million.
Signs of strength in the Bitcoin network as its “use case” is arguably expanded by the growing BRC-20 movement should be
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