The topic of high commissions in Bitcoin has become almost the main news this week. Moreover, the situation got so heated that cryptocurrency exchange Binance was forced to shut down BTC withdrawals from its trading platform twice in one day. As a result, its representatives introduced a flexible fee instead of a fixed one.

Earlier in the week, fees for a single transaction on the Bitcoin network exceeded the equivalent of $20. Here’s a relevant screenshot from Monday.

In contrast, the equivalent figure today is $3.

That is, the situation has come to a relative normalcy, but dealing with the reasons for the initial rise in commissions in the Bitcoin community is not over yet.

Why are Bitcoin commissions rising?

BRC-20 is an experimental token standard for the Bitcoin blockchain. It was created by an anonymous digital asset enthusiast under the pseudonym Domo in March 2023. BRC-20 tokens are essentially a counterpart to the already familiar ERC-20 token standard based on Etherium. However, unlike the latter, BRC-20 does not use smart contracts.

BRC-20 leverages information using the Ordinals protocol and JSON data to create, mine and transfer tokens. As of today, 14,307 different tokens have already been issued using the BRC-20 standard.

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The Ordinals protocol itself allows the creation of so-called ordinals – unique pieces of information that are associated with each individual satoshi. We wrote more about the principle of the protocol in our article.

NFT in the Bitcoin network has reached such a large scale that its support was announced by representatives of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, among others. This update will take place in May 2023, but in the meantime, employees of the company invite “quality NFT-projects in Bitcoin”.

What’s the problem with BRC-20 on the Bitcoin network?

BRC-20 tokens can only be issued and exchanged through regular transactions. The popularisation of the standard has led to many more transactions in the blocks: this month, in particular, an all-time high was set for the number of BTC transfers processed per day.

The more unconfirmed transactions there are in the so-called mempool, the more users are willing to pay for their further processing by miners. This predictably leads to higher fees. Specifically, on May 8, 2023, the average cost of conducting a transfer was $31, a record at this point in the market cycle.

How exactly are transaction fees generated in Bitcoin? You can read more about this in our in-depth article.

According to Cointelegraph’s sources, a record number of transactions per block was also set the day before. The average was close to 3,800 transfers per block, although at times it exceeded 5,000 transactions per block.

This morning there are over 322,000 transactions left in the mempool or transaction confirmation queue. Until this queue is “cleared” by the miners, fees will not return to normal adequate levels.

The success of Ordinals has to do with the novelty of the concept directly to the Bitcoin ecosystem and memes, as BRC-20 also has a lot of meme-coins. The HYIP continues to gain momentum: just two days ago, BRC-20 token capitalisation crossed the $600 million mark and today it stands at $685 million.

However, as the popularity of these tokens grows, the usability of Bitcoin’s blockchain declines. This is something the developers of Bitcoin Core, the main organisation of independent BTC developers, want to combat.

In their circles, BRC-20 is considered to be a common blockchain spam, that is, a supposedly useless activity that does not benefit the first cryptocurrency. This is exactly what popular developer Luke Dash Jr. hinted at in one of his posts. Here’s his rejoinder, which Unchained cites.

Measures should have been taken months ago. Spam filtering has been standard Bitcoin Core practice since day one.

Such comments are very amusing, as they essentially call for censorship of certain activity within a decentralised blockchain that should, in fact, offer its users complete freedom. However, developers are turning a blind eye to this and claiming the need to limit the development of this trend, even though ordinary users clearly do not want this.

Dash Jr has suggested radical measures up to a complete shutdown of Ordinals. Unsurprisingly, his initiative drew a mixed reaction on Twitter. Some commenters noted that stopping NFT issuance based on Ordinals would make previously issued “tokens” much more valuable. Others stated that the blockchain’s congestion problem really needs to be addressed by any means necessary.

Another Bitcoin Core developer named Ali Sherif suggested at a special developer forum that changes be made to Bitcoin’s code base that would shut down the ability to create such transactions. He also suggested creating a special tool that would simply remove all non-standard transactions for the already familiar Taproot. BRC-20 tokens fall into this category.

Here’s a relevant rejoinder from Sheriff, in which he shares his take on what’s going on.

I know some people will criticise this – and that’s perfectly fine. However, we need a solution that will satisfy everyone. We have indirectly allowed the current situation to happen, although it was not possible before. So we also need to do something so that a similar blockchain overload will never happen again with Taproot.

The already mentioned Luke Dash Jr. insists on stopping such activity on the Bitcoin network as quickly as possible. Here’s his quote.

As this is a bug fix, there’s no need to wait for a separate release for it.

That said, it's worth noting that not everyone at Bitcoin Core supports this manifestation of censorship. Accordingly, it is not certain that such a solution will be adopted, as it requires the agreement of the majority in that organisation.

There is another side to this confrontation: the miners. On the one hand they benefit from both Ordinals and BRC-20 evolving, bringing them more revenue from commissions. On the other hand, a blockchain overload could lead to a critical situation in which Bitcoin’s popularity as a transaction tool would plummet.

We have clarified the latest data: the daily income of miners is now $40 million per day. This is the best result for the last year, which means that ASIC-miner owners are definitely happy with what is happening with NFT in Bitcoin network. Consequently, they may not want to block such transactions and keep their nodes updated with elements of censorship, as it will hit their earnings.


We believe that such comments and actions by Bitcoin developers could negatively affect the reputation of the first cryptocurrency. Of course, the BTC blockchain was not invented for the distribution of unique pictures and meme tokens, but for the decentralized exchange of value. However, Bitcoin users eventually came up with this particular way of using the network, so the situation is worth reckoning with. Most importantly, they are willing to pay a lot of money to interact with the blockchain - which confirms the serious demand for the current trend.

It is also important to understand that Bitcoin NFT is just the first mass trend of unconventional use of BTC blockchain, and it will not end there. Perhaps three months from now, some anonymous developer will come up with a new way of using the cryptocurrency network along the lines of the decentralised finance (DeFi) sphere, which will also overload the blockchain? Does this mean that Bitcoin Core representatives will have to block such transactions as well?

This is, of course, a rhetorical question. Obviously, Bitcoin with censorship will no longer be as attractive as it is now - and Bitcoin Core reps should understand that. On top of that, the peak of hype for NFT and BRC20 tokens has now subsided, and transactions have returned to relatively adequate levels. So it's not out of the question to leave things as they are.


Stay tuned for more developments in our cryptochat ex-wealthy. There we await the onset of a new bullrun, which should be even bigger and more interesting than the previous ones.