Bitcoin (BTC) Transaction Fees Skyrocket: What’s Causing the Surge?
Bitcoin transaction fees have suddenly spiked to unprecedented levels, causing concern among users. The primary reason behind this surge in fees is the congestion on the BTC network, as per the latest data.
OKX has been moving a large number of Bitcoin Unspent Transaction Outputs (UTXOs) to their hot wallet, incurring transaction costs that are more than 10 times the usual rate seen in the past 24 hours.
The Bitcoin network is currently facing a backlog of transactions waiting to be confirmed in the mempool, leading users to pay over 500 satoshis per byte for immediate transactions, translating to $50-100 for a regular transfer.
This high fee rate results in a substantial portion of Bitcoin being paid to miners by OKX during the consolidation process. In some cases, fees as high as $15,000 were paid to merge UTXOs worth only $48,000, accounting for over 30% of the total value.
With over 330,000 unconfirmed transactions and memory usage at 1.35 GB, suspicions have arisen regarding OKX’s actions of sorting and consolidating user wallets, drawing attention from the cryptocurrency community.
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