Note that the Ordinals protocol for launching Bitcoin-based NFT does overload the blockchain. As Glassnode analysts noted, the size of the BTC blockchain has grown by 24GB since its launch in early 2023. The current size of the Bitcoin network is estimated at 479.7GB. It turns out that the rate of blockchain weight increase has become really serious – it is due to information about text, images or other components that are added to the satoshi and then end up in the blocks.

Blockchain congestion has reached such a scale that the average fee for a Bitcoin transaction reached $31 the day before. This is the highest in two years.

As a result, the situation became so threatening that representatives of the Bitcoin Core development team took notice. Some of them suggested that transactions involving NFTs and meme tokens in Bitcoin should simply be blocked.

And while such a thing could be considered censorship, the developers are somehow not embarrassed by it. They believe they have the right to dictate exactly how the BTC blockchain should be used. And they do not take into account the opinion of other users, who are willing to pay a lot of fees to interact with NFT or BRC20-tokens.

How much does it cost to withdraw bitcoins from an exchange?

Naturally, the increase in commissions did not make users of trading platforms happy, in addition, it turned out to be noticeable. Now the Kraken exchange has increased BTC withdrawal fees for faster transactions. According to Cointelegraph’s sources, Kraken is now charging 0.00035 BTC, or roughly $10, for bitcoin withdrawals. Meanwhile, the minimum withdrawal amount is 0.0005 BTC or about $13.

Kraken customers can also take advantage of an alternative withdrawal method using the Lightning Network’s second-tier solution. It allows for almost instant BTC transfers with minimal fees, well, withdrawals from Kraken via LN are free.

However, it is worth noting here that Lightning Network transactions are conducted in open channels between users, for which you will also have to pay a fee. The same goes for bitcoin withdrawals to the main BTC network, which costs as a regular transaction. Accordingly, there is no way to call the Lightning Network a full-fledged solution to the increased fees in the Bitcoin blockchain.

On other exchanges, the withdrawal of the main cryptocurrency will cost more. Specifically, the OKX platform charges from 0.00096 BTC or $26 to 0.00192 BTC or $53 for such an operation. The minimum withdrawal amount is 0.001 BTC, which is approximately $27.

On the Huobi platform, the withdrawal procedure is even more disadvantageous for customers at the moment. A representative of the trading platform stated that the fee for Bitcoin withdrawals from the platform is 0.001 BTC. At the same time, Huobi has not added support for the Lightning Network until today.

The exchange representative also noted that this is a temporary measure, well, the fees will drop once the Bitcoin mempool’s load situation improves.

As a reminder, a mempool is a queue of transactions to be confirmed by miners. The more unconfirmed transactions in a mempool, the more time it takes to process all transfers. At the same time, the queue forces blockchain users to raise fees, which causes such congestion. We wrote more about other factors affecting this value in our previous article.

Mempool congestion was one of the reasons why the largest cryptocurrency exchange Binance suspended bitcoin withdrawals several times on May 8. At the time of writing, the trading platform is charging 0.001 BTC as a withdrawal fee.

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Bitcoin transaction fees have already started to drop significantly after another batch of fake news about BTC sales by government agencies in the US. The day before, rumours circulated on Twitter that government-linked cryptocurrency wallets had allegedly started getting rid of bitcoins en masse. The news initially caused panic and led to two major plunges in the cryptocurrency’s price locally.

However, it later turned out that the balance of government wallets had remained unchanged all along. The news that no one really sold the coins led to a short-term recovery in the value of BTC, which is still far from its recent local highs.

And it’s not just the price – fees on the major cryptocurrency’s network have also started to fall precipitously. According to the Mempool Space platform, the average cost of a BTC transfer has fallen below $2 today.

With this in mind, we can assume that the potential conflict between Bitcoin Core developers and miners will never come to fruition. As we have already noted, some developers wanted to introduce very radical changes to the BTC protocol in order to avoid similar “blockchain clogging” in the future. Miners, on the other hand, benefit from this short-term upsurge, as their earnings also increase due to higher commissions.


We believe that dynamic fees for withdrawing cryptoassets from exchanges will eventually become the norm. However, Bitcoin's commissions are now falling steadily due to lower blockchain load, which means it does not make sense for Binance and other platforms to keep them at the same level. Accordingly, in the near future we are likely to hear about either a lowering of the current level of withdrawal costs or more profound changes to the system.