During March 2023, Bitcoin’s network fees witnessed a tremendous surge, rising more than 40% higher after a 122% jump in the first week of February. Over 660,000 transactions have been made and 150 bitcoins worth $4.2 million have been added to the blockchain.
Bitcoin Fees Soar in March, Over 50,000 Unconfirmed Transactions in the Mempool
As of 2:30 p.m. ET on March 31st 2023, there are approximately 54,000 unconfirmed Bitcoin transactions according to mempool.space data. Following the network fee increase in the early days of February, the wait times and fees for Bitcoin transactions have shot up in March.
The demand for Ordinal Inscription transactions caused the fees to rise 122% in a mere 10 days. With the price of BTC significantly higher and the Ordinal Inscription trend remains strong, the average and median-sized fees for transfers have increased over the past few weeks. On February 8th 2023, the average fee was $1.704 per transfer, or 41.17% lower than today.
According to bitinfocharts.com data on Friday afternoon (ET), the average BTC transaction fee was 0.000084 BTC ($2.40 per transaction). Meanwhile, the median-sized fee rose 42.02% from $0.69 to $0.98 per transaction during the same time. The average fees for transfers rose to $4.24 per transaction on March 24th, while the median fee was $1.37.
At the time of writing, more than 662,000 Ordinal Inscriptions have been made on the Bitcoin blockchain and some of the fees associated with these transactions have gone up. 150.2457 BTC worth of fees have been charged for these Ordinal Inscriptions.
Although the fees for BTC are higher than average and median fees, they still remain lower than those paid on the Ethereum (ETH) network. The average ETH transaction fee today is 0.003 ETH, or $5.43 per transaction. The median-sized ether fee is 0.0014 ETH, or $2.54 per transfer. On the other hand, the average and median BTC fees are $0.98 to $2.40 for each transaction.
Block time intervals were quicker than the ten-minute average before the last difficulty change. They averaged nine minutes 33 seconds during the last 2,016 block blocks. They currently range between nine minutes 50 seconds and ten minutes 21 seconds.
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