Bitcoin Mempool Fills, Transactions Fees Double; Here’s Why

Bitcoin mining is an important part of the bitcoin ecosystem. Miners who participate in mempools help to confirm transactions for which they receive a reward once a transaction is cleared. Usually, the mempool is ‘free’ and transactions go through easily with low fees but there are times when the mempool fills up causing transactions fees to surge. This was what took place at the start of March. Bitcoin Transaction Fees Surge At the beginning of the month, bitcoin had experienced higher transaction fees. These higher fees were as a result of transaction clustering in the mempool. Once the mempool has filled to a point where there were too many transactions to confirm, fees had invariably gone up given that transactions are confirmed based on the fee they carry. So transactions with higher fees had been confirmed first. Related Reading | Why Is Bitcoin So Volatile, Anyway? Fidelity Digital Assets Explains In order to compete in this pool that had filled up, incoming transactions had to carry a higher transaction fee per vByte (virtual byte) which is the size of the transaction. This caused fees to climb starting on March 1st and continuing for the next two days. These increased transaction fees had seen the average transaction fees per day rise for the past week to $691,000. BTC recovers above $40K | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView.com This volume had packed on the second day, March 2nd, where transactions fees climbed ...