Events

The term of transaction fee crisis refers to extreme volatility in fees and processing times under increasing system load that negatively affects all participants in the cryptocurrency market. However, little research has been done in academia to examine this potentially catastrophic issue for a cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin. In this talk, the speaker presents a collaborative study based on the Bitcoin network and explores a theoretical framework that describes the relationships between transaction fees and transaction confirmation delays. Empirical analyses based on this framework provide evidence that Bitcoin platform protocols aimed at regulating the system load tend to incite the transaction fee crisis. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first formal study of the transaction fee crisis, and our research findings lay a foundation for further research that will offer guidance on developing better congestion management mechanisms for cryptocurrency ecosystems.