These Bitcoin-based tokens are queuing up along with regular Bitcoin transactions to be processed by miners. One of the most popular such coins, which are also known as BRC 20 tokens, is Ordi. Its market capitalization has reached more than $500 million since its recent introduction. 

“The high network fees have been caused by the en-masse minting of BRC-20 token,” said Jaime Baeza, founder and managing partner at digital asset hedge fund ANB Investments.  Until recently, memecoins and NFT collections such as Bored Apes and CryptoPunks were predominately based on Ethereum and served as a catalyst that helped to make that platform the world’s most commercially important blockchain.

Eoin Treacy's view

The introduction of the Lightning network last year was supposed to speed up transactions. It was also the innovation that enabled the creation of bitcoin offshoots which has boosted traffic across the bitcoin network over the last six months.

The creators of the add-on network obviously did not rely on their experience of meme popularity to build sufficient capacity. One of the biggest challenges to the claim bitcoin will eventually be a major vehicle of exchange is the inadequacy of the network capacity. The Lightning network was hailed as a solution to that problem and it is obviously not working.