Bitcoin transaction fees surge to 24-month high amid BRC-20 memecoin mania
The common Bitcoin transaction price has surged to $30.91 — a stage 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 — possible 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 as a consequence of issues over miners utilizing fossil fuels.
As we speak, meme coin mania is driving exercise on the Bitcoin community by way of the lately launched BRC-20 commonplace.
What’s BRC-20?
In March, the BRC-20 commonplace was created by an nameless particular person often known as “Domo.”
Whereas Bitcoin was historically a single-asset blockchain, the Ordinals protocol, by way of the Taproot comfortable fork, has enabled fungible BRC-20 property 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 is able to finally result in larger transaction charges and chain bloat – with BRC-20 added to the combo, that scenario is taking part in out.
In keeping 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 listing reveals tokens named d*ck, P*SY, attractive, and f*ck, indicating the overall triviality of the BRC-20 house presently.
Bitcoin on line casino
Regardless of this, echoing a remark from RamenPanda, foobar is adamant that BRC-20 tokens can be a major think about rising Bitcoin dominance, making Ethereum irrelevant.
“Subsequent bull market can be pushed by Bitcoin and BRC20 tokens
Bitcoin dominance will skyrocket to above 70%
Ethereum will turn out to be irrelevant.”
Equally, Degen Spartan expressed a “can’t beat ’em, be a part of ’em” perspective in the direction of BRC-20 — saying for those who’re going to memecoin, you would possibly as properly do it on Bitcoin.
“The eventual conclusion of the janky brc20 experiment can be that it’s higher to shitcoin on a sequence goal constructed to deal with and facilitate a full suite shitcoin on line casino.“
Willy Woo stated there are professionals and cons to the present scenario. He defined that block rewards can 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.
