After the halving, there was a significant increase in fees on bitcoin transactions.
In reality, the increase had already started a few days earlier, on April 29th to be precise, seeing that the average had always been less than $1 per transaction in the days before, while on the 29th it rose to $1.28.
Since then it has continued to grow, rising to almost $3 on April 30th and almost $3.2 on May 8th.
The highest peak of the average daily fee per transaction rose to $5.16 on May 14th and then fell to between $3.5 and $4.
Surely this increase is due to the halving, considering that after May 11th there was a significant increase in block time due to a reduction in hashrate not yet followed by a reduction in difficulty.
In the next few days, there will be a reduction in the difficulty, which should bring the block time back to around 10 minutes, so as to increase the number of mined blocks every day, and therefore the number of transactions validated.
Bitcoin: transaction fees may fall again.
As the number of validated transactions increases, fees may fall again.
It is worth noting that during the halving period, the number of transactions validated daily ranged between 300,000 and 350,000, while on May 13th this figure started to fall to a minimum of 233,000 on May 17th.
The fewer transactions are able to be validated, the more fees have to be paid to make sure that the transactions are selected from the queue of those being pending to be validated.
It should also be said, however, that the peak in fees these days is very similar to what happened between late May and early June last year, which in turn was followed by an even higher peak in late June when the price rose above $12,500 and the fees exceeded $6.5.
Therefore, this is not an anomaly, but an absolutely recurring dynamic, due to an increase in attention and interest in Bitcoin and which occurs particularly every time the price rises a lot.
For example, even in June and August 2017 the current peaks were reached and exceeded, while even in December of the same year there was a much higher one.
In other words, it is possible that the current peak will spontaneously fade away as soon as the difficulty is reduced.
