Elon Musk’s Involvement With BTC, Pushed The Fees To Highest Levels

Elon Musk’s involvement with BTC was the reason why the BTC fees were skyrocketing recently and a large number of unprocessed transactions only shows how the activity on the network is surging so let’s read more in our latest Bitcoin news.

Both the trade and the demand are high for the coin and the average transaction fees for Bitcoin hit $17,206 as per the data from BitInfoCharts which shows its surpassed its previous 2021 high of $17.086. The Friday average fees are on the highest level as well especially since traders were trying to cash out before bitcoin’s price collapsed entirely. The transaction fees cover the utility cost of the vast computing power needed to process the transactions.

To process the transactions, the miners have to race to solve the puzzles and for doing so, the network rewards them with freshly minted BTC out the oven. The high transaction fees indicated high demand as the fees rise when the demand for processing transactions surpasses the supply of the miners that are willing to process them. To make it worthwhile, the miners boosted the fees so that the network participants process only the transactions that are the most important. But why did the fees increase? One of the reasons was Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk who became the biggest Bitcoin advocate.

Elon Musk’s involvement with BTC was the main reason behind the rise and now the price even hit $32,940 the day after. According to the data from Blockchain.com, there are more than 71MB of transactions that have to be processed on the blockchain. On January 7 there were 25 MBs worth waiting to be processed but by January 15 it rose to 85MB which is a staggering increase of 240%.

This is highly likely to stay high until the miners process the surge in the buyers that started cashing out after Musk’s vote of confidence and also due to the traders cashing out the big bucks. The all-time high for BTC average transactions fee was set back on December 21, 2017, when the price was near $20,000. Back in 2017, the demand for processing transactions was so high that the fees reached $54.90.