Bitcoin (BTC) fees have reached their highest level in years. To be more precise, according to BitInfoCharts, fees are at their highest point since April 2021 when Bitcoin was reaching new highs at that time. Due to this situation, fees surpassed the block reward at over 7 BTC in fees for some blocks.Â
Bitcoin Fees Hit Their Highest Level in YearsÂ
Bitcoin fees have been at their highest level in years. People who wanted to use Bitcoin to send or receive transactions were paying a median fee of around 600 sat/vB. Hence, a large number of users could not send or receive Bitcoin to process small payments.Â
Miners that process blocks get rewarded with 6.25 BTC per block and fees. Usually, this is what happened over the last years and during most of Bitcoin’s history, block rewards were larger than the fees paid by users while sending Bitcoin. As we can see in PlanB’s post on X, median bees for block 821484 surpassed 600 sat/vB with fees amounting to 7.155 BTC ($304,442 at that time).Â
Stephan Livera, the Head of Education at Swan Bitcoin said that those high fees are a good moment for dary earner/spender of Bitcoin to move to the Lightning Network. It is important to note that the Lightning Network, also known as LN, is a second-layer scaling solution for Bitcoin that allows users to send and receive Bitcoin in seconds (almost immediately) and for just a few sats.Â
One of the reasons behind the recent increase in fees is linked to some users that are sending JPGs or ordinals on the Bitcoin network. To do so and spam Bitcoin blocks, they have to pay a large fee. This also represents an opportunity for the Bitcoin network to understand how valuable block space is.Â
At the time of writing this article, Bitcoin fees have fallen to 127 sat/vB or $0.03.Â
