Bitcoin transaction fees surge to 24-month high amid BRC-20 memecoin mania

The typical Bitcoin transaction price has surged to $30.91 — a degree not seen since April 2021, per knowledge from ycharts.com.

The interval within the run-up to April 2021 was characterised by a mania that noticed Bitcoin run to $64,900 — doubtless pushed by Coinbase’s NASDAQ itemizing and the narrative that crypto goes mainstream.

This run ended abruptly as China prolonged its anti-crypto coverage to ban Proof-of-Work mining, adopted by Elon Musk asserting Tesla would stop accepting BTC for car purchases resulting from issues over miners utilizing fossil fuels.

Right this moment, meme coin mania is driving exercise on the Bitcoin community by way of the not too long ago launched BRC-20 normal.

What’s BRC-20?

In March, the BRC-20 normal was created by an nameless particular person referred to as “Domo.”

Whereas Bitcoin was historically a single-asset blockchain, the Ordinals protocol, by way of the Taproot mushy fork, has enabled fungible BRC-20 belongings to function on the chain.

Taproot launched in November 2021 to make transactions faster and cost-effective whereas laying the groundwork for sensible contracts and dApps.

By February, Taproot’s capabilities had been getting used to retailer jpegs and movies immediately on the blockchain, consequently making a non-fungible market on Bitcoin — a lot to the annoyance of purists.

On the time, commentators warned that this could finally result in greater transaction charges and chain bloat – with BRC-20 added to the combination, that scenario is taking part in out.

In line with the brc-20.io web site, BRC-20 tokens have a complete market cap of $693.2 million. The highest three tokens are Ordi, Nals, and Pepe —valued at $411.3 million, $42.3 million, and $34.7 million, respectively.

Scrolling the record exhibits tokens named d*ck, P*SY, attractive, and f*ck, indicating the overall triviality of the BRC-20 area at the moment.

Bitcoin on line casino

Regardless of this, echoing a remark from RamenPanda, foobar is adamant that BRC-20 tokens might be a big consider rising Bitcoin dominance, making Ethereum irrelevant.

“Subsequent bull market might be pushed by Bitcoin and BRC20 tokens

Bitcoin dominance will skyrocket to above 70%

Ethereum will grow to be irrelevant.”

Equally, Degen Spartan expressed a “can’t beat ’em, be part of ’em” perspective in direction of BRC-20 — saying when you’re going to memecoin, you would possibly as nicely do it on Bitcoin.

“The eventual conclusion of the janky brc20 experiment might be that it’s higher to shitcoin on a series function constructed to accommodate and facilitate a full suite shitcoin on line casino.“

Willy Woo stated there are execs and cons to the present scenario. He defined that block rewards might be zero someday, that means another supply of mining income is required to maintain miners incentivized.

On the identical time, the trade-off is “dangerous for nodes and decentralisation” — including that the affect of Ordinals is going on at a time when mining rewards are nonetheless excessive.