- Bitcoin network sees growth as interest in memecoins increases.
- Miners’ earnings are starting to fall.
The crypto market has been flooded with memecoins like PEPE lately. Users have flocked to memecoins and interest in them has spiked again. An unlikely recipient of the hype was Bitcoin.
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Bitcoin joins the party
According to Messari data, memecoins did not gain traction on Ethereum scaling solutions, but have made their mark on the Bitcoin network.
These memecoins were able to spread to the network thanks to the new BRC-20 standard built on the Ordinals protocol.
The rising interest in memecoins affected the daily transaction fees generated on the network. The data showed that BRC-20 Ordinal transactions generated more than $1.5 million in daily fees.
While general transactions still make up the bulk of fees generated on the network, a large portion of them were now generated by BRC-20 transactions.
However, the number of standard Bitcoin transactions is starting to decrease.
There was a significant drop in Bitcoin activity in May, coinciding with a market-wide price correction.
This drop in activity was notable as it marked the first time since July 2021 that the number of daily unique Bitcoin addresses fell below 800,000.
Consequences for miners
The declining transactions on the Bitcoin network may affect the condition of Bitcoin miners and their earning capacity. At the time of writing, the daily revenue generated by miners fell from $41.72 million to $29.44 million over the past few days.
In addition, there was a recent upward trend in the hash rate, which reached an all-time high of 350 tera hashes per second, based on a 30-day moving average.
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A high hash rate improves the overall security and stability of the network by making it more resistant to possible attacks.
However, a high hash rate increases competition between miners. This makes it more challenging for individual miners to earn rewards due to the higher computing power required.