As Binance’s Bitcoin withdrawals came to a standstill for the second time, the exchange is striving to make the BTC Lightning network available to prevent a repeat of the same.
On 8 May, the top trading platform once again announced halting BTC withdrawal, citing a “large volume of pending transactions,” due to an unexpected surge in the transaction fees.
“We’re replacing the pending $BTC withdrawal transactions with a higher fee so that they get picked up by mining pools,” the tweet added.
Within a few hours, Binance restored withdrawals while stating that the pending transactions were being handled and were being replaced with higher transaction fees.
To prevent a similar recurrence in the future, our fees have been adjusted. We will continue to monitor on-chain activity and adjust accordingly if needed.
A day earlier, Binance had to briefly halt Bitcoin withdrawals due to an alleged overflow of transactions on the blockchain. Over a half-hour later, withdrawals were once again permitted.
Around 400,000 transactions awaited in the Bitcoin mempool to be processed. As per data from mempool.space, the figure rose roughly by 485,000.
In addition, Bitcoin transaction costs touched sky-high rates. According to YCharts statistics, BTC transaction fees hit $9.62, on 5 May, which was the highest level in almost two years.
The developments created quite a stir among the BTC community since some users interpreted the high transaction fees and the sizable backlog as an assault against the ecosystem.
Many attributed the surge to Ordinals, a protocol used for minting NFT-like assets on Bitcoin.
The entire amount of digital assets powered by Bitcoin, known as inscriptions, sailed through 4.3 million on the weekend, data from the Dune dashboard showed.
Critics Claim Ordinals Are An Attack On Bitcoin’s Fungibility
Just last week, BTC Ordinals hit more than 372k Inscriptions, with total fees reaching $7.6 million, based on the TronWeekly report.
But, not everyone is happy with the developments. Critics label the ordinals protocol an attack on Bitcoin’s fungibility which states that each BTC should be indistinguishable from the other.
They argue that by adding arbitrary data to the blockchain, ordinals make some BTCs more valuable or desired than others based on their contents.
Price-wise, the dominant crypto has remained fairly stable over the weekend despite a shift in market mood towards the meme coin mania.
According to coinmarketcap, BTC is trading at $28218, down by 3% in the past 24 hours.