Despite some improvement in waitlisted transaction orders for Bitcoin on Wednesday, there is still a high level of network congestion. The median confirmation time for transactions is over ten minutes, and the on-chain metric for network fulfillment is at its highest level since February and December of 2022.
There are currently hundreds of thousands of transactions waiting to be confirmed, far exceeding the normal level in the tens of thousands. At least one Bitcoin proponent has suggested that this is due to a DDoS attack caused by BTC senders using BRC-20 ordinal scripts.
Binance Plans to Implement Lightning Network for Withdrawals
Although processing times have slightly improved, the network has not yet fully recovered to normal speeds. Binance had to pause Bitcoin withdrawals for a few hours on Sunday due to long wait times and high fees before restoring services Monday. However, the exchange hopes to utilize the Lightning Network to speed up transactions. Binance announced that they are working on enabling BTC Lightning Network withdrawals.
The Lightning Network is a “Layer-2” blockchain scaling platform for handling Bitcoin transactions. It periodically updates with the “Layer-1” or base chain to quickly update it with recent transactions. This enables it to keep track of Bitcoin orders while waiting for the mempool to clear up.
Bitcoin Transaction Fee Soars Due to Network Congestion
The memory pool of unconfirmed transactions remains high, with hundreds of thousands of orders waiting to be processed. This is much higher than the normal level of tens of thousands during periods of low network congestion. The total backlog of BTC orders since May 6 is at an unprecedented level unseen since June 2021, during a crypto bull run. The current jam was caused by order senders using the BRC-20 token standard to mint “ordinal” NFTs using the BTC blockchain.
One Bitcoin supporter, John W. Ratcliff, has suggested that BTC’s network is under attack as a result of senders adding unnecessary data-wasting formats. Although miners are earning higher fees, this is still an odd way to attack the network. Despite this, necessity appears to be the mother of innovation.
