Bitcoin Mempool Gets Engorged With 125K Transactions in Queue

Earlier today, the count of trades waiting to be validated in the Bitcoin mempool jumped to over 125,000. This translates to about 149 megabytes of data pending to be shifted to the blockchain, which is adequate to fill up a minimum of 107 forthcoming blocks.

Even though it is smaller than the surge that resulted in a backlog of 143,000+ transactions on December 17, 2020, the increasingly jam-packed mempool is strengthening the argument of Bitcoin’s skeptics while discussing about the cost and speed of cryptocurrency trades.

The mempool is generally referred as the “waiting area” for incoming trades before getting confirmed and validated independently by every node linked to the network.

The previous time, the mempool hit zero level was on January 1st of this year. It has been a long-time after recording zero backlog in mempool.

As per Bitcoin network statistics provided by mempool.observer, a minimum charge of 93 sat/byte is presently suggested to guarantee that a trade is taken into accounted in the forthcoming block. On the basis of a reference price of $46,280 for Bitcoin and a median size of 224 bytes per trade, the transaction fee computes to be $9.63.

Earlier in the day, the suggested fee for the following block inclusion surged to 141.90 sat/byte, as per another Twitter centered services tracking Bitcoin network fees. Back on February 9, an aggregate of 84.72 Bitcoin was generated in the form of transaction charges, which translates to $2.05 million in miner revenue.

Transaction charges had stayed almost justifiable for a major part of November and December 2020, despite an overall bull market propelled prices over earlier all-time highs.

Bitcoin’s second layer solution to achieve scalability – the Lightning Network – is also recording historical highs, in partaking node count and dollar value of overall Bitcoin capacity throughout all channels.

Back in February 2, one of the top cryptocurrency exchanges, OKEx, revealed its intention to embed Lightning into their exchange operations, in order to save transaction charges while also relieving the transaction queue burden on mempool.