The Rise of Memecoins and the Impact on Bitcoin Transaction Fees.

Fees on the Bitcoin blockchain have surged to two-year highs as demand for block space increases due to the rising popularity of the Ordinals protocol and the 'Bitcoin Request for Comment' (BRC-20) tokens. The number of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) tied to the Bitcoin blockchain has surged above 3 million, mainly consisting of text-based assets. The BRC-20 token standard allows users to issue transferable tokens directly through the network, which has spurred a collection of digital artwork and meme tokens built on Bitcoin. However, the rapid transactional activity has caused network congestion, with nearly 415,000 unconfirmed Bitcoin transactions at writing time on Monday.