The developers of Bitcoin network are discussing the possibility of blocking meme coin transactions, since the growth in the number of speculative coins led to a record number of transactions and an increase in commissions on the blockchain in May.
“I really think the system is being abused. Bitcoin was never intended to be used as a base layer for memcoins,” said developer Ali Sherif.
Although the situation has been resolved, the participants of crypto community fear that the future active trading of meme coins will again overload the network and disrupt the use of BTC as a means of payment and a means of preserving value. They advocate the use of software to block such transactions, similar to a spam filter.
However, other developers are defending the innovation in the form of the Ordinals protocol, which allows placing meme coins and non-fungible tokens (NFT) on the Bitcoin blockchain in large quantities. They claim that this innovation can have wide applications.
Moreover, some crypto enthusiasts believe that the Bitcoin network should be an “auction market for block space”, and Ordinals only increases the demand for this space. So, now there are about 25,000 meme coins in the Bitcoin blockchain with a market value of about $475 million.
The hype around meme coins gained momentum in the spring, when these tokens increased in value several times. In particular, the meme coin Shiba Inu pushed Binance USD from the 14th place in the list of cryptocurrencies in terms of market capitalization. Moreover, the number of long-term holders of Shiba Inu has also reached a new high.
In addition, the popular PEPE meme coin has reached a new historical high of $0.00000110, in just three weeks its price has increased by 39,000%. The price of meme coin based on Ethereum WOJAK also reached record values in just a week — by more than 1000%.
However, by mid-May, the popularity of meme coins had almost disappeared: the price of PEPE decreased by 60%, the hype around minting tokens in the Bitcoin network also subsided.
