- The situation caused a jump in BTC gas fees to a 2-year high.
- Bitcoin network has recently seen a frenzy of activities, including inscriptions through ordinals.
Binance was forced to halt Bitcoin (BTC) withdrawals for the second time Sunday evening U.S. time over a ‘large volume of pending transactions’ caused by a surge in gas fees.
The first pause happened Sunday afternoon when the levels of unconfirmed transactions rose to record high. At the time, the transactions figures were reported by mempool.space at about 395,000, more than a 500% jump in a month.
‘‘We have temporarily closed BTC withdrawals due to the large volume of pending transactions. Our team is working on a fix and will reopen (the) withdrawals as soon as possible,’’ Binance wrote on Twitter. ‘‘There is a large volume of withdrawals transactions from Binance still pending as our set fees did not anticipate the recent surge in BTC network gas fees.’’
Soaring Gas Fees
As a result, the backlog of pending transactions’ gas fees jumped to more than $9, the highest ever recorded since 2021, per data from YCharts. The uptick comes at a time of rising popularity in inscriptions on Bitcoin through ordinals, where users are flocking to mint non-fungible tokens on the blockchain.
Per the latest update shared with Distributed on Monday, Binance resumed the suspended transactions at press time. The exchange said that part of the steps taken to clear the backlogs was replacing pending withdrawal transactions with higher fees to be picked by the network validators.
Binance is also planning to integrate BTC Lightning Network – a layer-2 payment protocol on the network created for faster transactions – in the future to prevent a similar occurrence.
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