Bitcoin falls below $41,000 as cryptocurrency price rise cools

that much bitcoin price It fell below $41,000 on Monday morning, erasing last week’s gains as the rally cooled.

At the time of publication, Bitcoin It’s trading at just over $40,600, down 2.9% in the last 24 hours and 3.9% this week, according to data from CoinGecko.

The price plunge came as Bitcoin’s average transaction fee surged to a yearly high of $38.43, per data from Ycharts.

The surge in transaction fees comes as a result of the growing popularity of Bitcoin Ordinals, a type of unique digital asset engraved on the smallest unit of Bitcoin, the satoshi. According to the Dune Analytics inscription analytics dashboard by “@dgtl_assets”, miners earned just under $10 million in transaction fees from Ordinals on Saturday, December 16, and $8.4 million on Sunday, December 17.

High transaction fees due to Ordinals also appear to be clogging the Bitcoin network. At the time of publication, mempool.space indicates that transactions with fewer than 290,000 transactions have not been confirmed and transaction fees of less than $1.37 are not prioritized.

Bitcoin’s slump is reflected in the broader cryptocurrency market, with the total market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies falling 3.5% in the past day to $1.59 trillion. Meanwhile, all coins in CoinGecko’s top 20 had trading suspended for the day. stablecoin. avalanche It’s down more than 11% in the last 24 hours, trading at $37.28, leading the losses in the top 20.

Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, is currently trading at around $2,100, down nearly 4% on the day. Meme Coin has been hit hard by the market downturn. Dogecoin There was a decrease of almost 8%, and Shiba Inus decreased by 10%. SolanaThe underlying meme coin BONK fell more than 12%.