Post Bitcoin Halving, the BTC Mempool Reaches Its Biggest Size While Transaction Fee Soars
Post the Bitcoin halving that took place last week on May 11, the complexities of the Bitcoin have been on a rise when it comes to transaction fee and the mempool size.
Reportedly, the Bitcoin mempool size has expanded significantly, and the biggest in last two years, as the number of unconfirmed transactions have shot up considerably in the recent weeks.
Besides, post the Bitcoin halving the mining interest has got significantly down due to the fall in profitability. Also, as the complexity of Bitcoin algorithm increases Bitcoin blocks are taking longer to be mined as transactions take longer time to get confirmed.
The Bitcoin mempool basically represents the collection of all transactions which have been broadcasted but not included in the block. The transactions waiting in the mempool get selected to be included in the newly mined blocks depending on the fees they are willing to pay.
Thus, transactions with low fee can take much longer time than expected and remain stuck in the mempool before getting confirmed. As per the latest data, the seven day average of the BTC mempool size stands at 67.87 MB which is the highest since January 2018. In just under a week, the mempool size has more than doubled.
Moreover, as per the data by blockchain.com the average confirmation time for a transaction to be included in the block has gone anywhere between 7-16 minutes.
Post the Bitcoin halving, the Bitcoin mining activity has significantly dropped since mining incentives are badly hurt. As more miners are dropping off the Bitcoin network, the number of unconfirmed transactions are on the rise.
These unconfirmed transactions are choking up the network, the average transaction fee on the BTC network has surged to an 11-month high. As per the data by BitInfoCharts, the average transaction fee as on May 20 is $6.64.
Just over the last week’s time, the average transaction cost has increased over 150%. Astonishingly, BTC’s average transactions fee has gone up by 1742% since the beginning of 2020.
On Wednesday, May 20, the Bitcoin market sold off over 7% as BTC price slipped close to $9000. A popular Twitter bot account “Whale Alert” which tracks on-chain transactions for multiple blockchains, tweeted that around 50 BTC were transferred from “a possible Satoshi wallet”.
The tweet further states “The coins in this transaction were mined in the first month of Bitcoin's existence”.