After days of congestion, the backlog of unconfirmed bitcoin transactions is finally starting to clear up as miners catch up. According to statistics from mempool.io, high-priority transactions were priced at $3 per transfer, while low-priority transactions cost $2.23 per transfer on May 11. However, onchain fees have significantly subsided over the past three days. A high-priority transaction now costs $0.83, a medium-priority transfer is priced at $0.79, and a low-priority transaction can cost around $0.75. This marks a significant improvement, with high-priority onchain fees sliding by 72.33% over the past 72 hours.
As of May 14, the number of unconfirmed transactions stuck in the queue has reduced to 263,406, which is just above half of what it held on May 7. The backlog has reduced by 36.28% in the past five days. While fees skyrocketed to roughly $30 per transaction on May 7, the Lightning Network’s capacity did not improve. Instead, the number of BTC locked into the Lightning Network dropped from 5,463 BTC on May 5 to today’s capacity of 5,415 BTC on May 14. This dip indicates that roughly $1.28 million in value left the Lightning Network amid the transaction backlog chaos.
On May 8, the Lightning Network boasted 73,352 unique channels. However, that number has since decreased to the current 71,286 unique channels. According to mempool.space’s Lightning Network metrics, roughly 5,057 BTC in capacity is on clearnet, while 253 BTC of capacity is using Tor. The remaining Lightning Network capacity is identified as “other.”