The market capitalization of BRC-20 tokens, which were introduced in March, has soared. According to Coin Metrics, Bitcoin miners raked $184 million in transaction fees in the second quarter of 2023.
This is the highest level in five quarters. Such growth has mainly been driven by the popularity of BRC-20 tokens and Ordinals. BRC-20 tokens are Bitcoin’s answer to Ethereum’s ERC-20 token standard, and Ordinals is a protocol that allows users to attach data to each satoshi, creating NFT-like assets in Bitcoin.
“Though the pace of fee payouts has slowed significantly in recent weeks as activity has waned, excitement abounds as the token standard does unlock experimental new use cases for Bitcoin’s core transaction types, and accelerates the push to scale Bitcoin with the Lightning Network,” Coin Metrics experts commented.
The market cap of BRC-20 tokens has reached nearly 240 million US dollars. Users must complete a transaction with a fee to mint BRC-20 tokens. Their request will be processed on the Bitcoin network and added to the next block.
This growth shows that users are willing to pay extra fees for transactions in exchange for speed. Miners are still earning a lot of money from transaction fees, especially when compared to previous quarters, even though the payout amounts associated with transaction fees have decreased as interest in BRC-20 has waned.
According to experts, other factors have also contributed to bolstering the miners’ quarterly revenues, such as the rising Bitcoin price and lower electricity rates in the United States.
