Odd Bitcoin Cash Mempool Spike Highlights Ecosytem Stagnation
Many people hope cryptocurrencies can replace traditional finance. That will only be the case if the individual crypto networks can process transactions without a hitch. In the case of Bitcoin Cash, there are some very unusual things happening. Particularly today’s mempool spike raises a lot of questions.
A BCH Transaction Spike
It has been a while since Bitcoin Cash made headlines for any reason at all. Today is not really different, albeit there is one very unusual development. For a few hours, the network suffered from a major influx of transactions. This was seemingly not a network stress test of any kind. It took miners and nodes several hours to work through the backlog, which is also unusual.
Bitcoin Cash is best known for its larger block size. As such, there should never be any mempool issues whatsoever. The statistics here confirm that aspect, as the mempool has been empty for a very long time until earlier today. Ever since this spike, things have returned to normal, with very few transactions being processed on the blockchain. A very odd turn of events, for obvious reasons.
Low fee Attack?
One of the potential reasons for these spikes comes in the form of low-free transactions being broadcasted. It is unclear if that would make it a dusting attack by default, albeit it is a strong possibility. A lot of the transactions causing the mempool backlog were sent with a fee of 7 Satoshi per byte or less.
On the surface, there is no real reason to spend high fees on Bitcoin Cash transactions. Most of the network transfers will be confirmed quickly by the mining pools. Why anyone would try to go lower with these fees and clog up the network while doing so is anyone’s guess. There seems to be no real purpose to this “attack”, other than generating buzz for BCH.
A Stagnant Network
When looking at the number of daily BCH transactions, a worrisome trend becomes apparent. Slowly but surely, the daily number of BCH transactions continues to decline. It is possible this mempool issue is an attempt to raise the overall figures, although that effort wouldn’t make too much of a difference. There is clearly a bigger problem present here, albeit one that might not necessarily be fixable.
Whereas Bitcoin notes vast amounts of transactions per day, Bitcoin Cash has never been able to live up to the hype. At its peak, the network had periods of over 1 million transactions per day on multiple occasions. Throughout late 2018 and early 2019, those figures decline to 800,000 and lower. In the past few weeks, there hasn’t been a spike over 75,000. The network is clearly stagnating, although the reason why is not exactly clear.
Disclaimer: This is not trading or investment advice. The above article is for entertainment and education purposes only. Please do your own research before purchasing or investing into any cryptocurrency or digital currency.
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JP Buntinx, Khareem Sudlow