The largest cryptocurrency network, Bitcoin’s transaction activity, is booming with a continued increase in the blockspace demand.
Since the past few months, transactions in mempool are increasing massively despite Bitcoin blocks being filled with maximum capacity. Mempool shows that there are currently over 470,000 unconfirmed transactions into the network.
According to Dune chart, the blockspace on Bitcoin has been utilized fully since May, 2023.
The increased demand in blockspace is directed towards the rise of Inscriptions, which is added as a metadata on Satoshi (sats) transactions. As the Inscriptions includes digital data and it is inscribed into sats, the size of that transactions essentially increases.
The onchain analyst from Glassnode shares that Inscription based transactions are dominating with over 50% confirmation. Inscriptions acquires 10% of the block size while paying around 20% in transaction fees for it.
It leads the Bitcoin network into a busy state, but fees and volume are not following the same trend as network volume is reaching yearly lows.
The analyst further demonstrated that the average transaction on the Bitcoin network was nearly 550 to 600 bytes in size until early 2023. Since the introduction of Bitcoin Inscriptions it has spiked over 1.4kb.
While Bitcoin is moving closer to its next halving in April 2024, the mempool congestion has fueled the uncertainty of the network.