The average processing cost of a Bitcoin transaction on Friday reached $ 17.206, surpassing the previous high of the current year, set at $ 17.086 on January 12. This is evidenced by the data of the BitInfoCharts service. The value recorded on January 29 turned out to be the highest since January 2018, when Bitcoin was pulling back from its previous all-time high of about $ 20,000.
The rise in transaction processing fees indicates an increase in the demand for transfers using the bitcoin network. This is exactly what happened on Friday, when the price of the cryptocurrency began to rise sharply amid the support of the founder of SpaceX and Tesla Elon Musk. Within a few hours, the rate rose from $ 32,000 to $ 38,000. Since then, the price has corrected to $ 32,500.
At the same time, the number of unconfirmed transactions in the mempool has noticeably decreased. At the time of preparation of the material, there are a little more than 25,000 of them, while on Friday the value rose to 85,000. At the same time, the amount of data enclosed in these transactions remains close to historical highs above 80 MB. In a similar stretch last year, the mempool was empty most of the time.
However, the situation has improved markedly compared to 2017, when at the peak of the hype, users had to pay up to $ 55 to process a Bitcoin transaction. This, however, cannot be said for the Ethereum blockchain, which is used by the most in-demand applications from the decentralized finance (DeFi) space. According to the CryptoFees portal, over the past 24 hours, Ethereum users paid $ 12 million in transaction processing fees, while Bitcoin users paid $ 4.7 million. At the beginning of the week, the Uniswap exchange alone consumed more fees than the entire Bitcoin network.
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