



Yesterday marked the second time in the last year that the amount of unconfirmed Bitcoin transactions surpassed 50,000. According to Blockchain.com, there were over 64,424 Bitcoin transactions waiting to be confirmed on April 24, 2019.





Notably, the last time this figure was this high also occurred during April of this year. From April 3 to April 6, the number of unconfirmed Bitcoin transactions was over 50,000. During this period of time, unconfirmed transactions peaked at over 75,900.





Zooming out, the industry has come a long way since the days when unconfirmed Bitcoin transactions would regularly congest the network. During the currency’s all-time high back in late 2017, there were over 180,000 unconfirmed transactions waiting to be confirmed at a single point in time.





Now, there are usually significantly less Bitcoin transactions waiting to be confirmed. This could be due to a variety of factors, such as fewer investors actively trading following the price crash in 2018, or the prevalence of a scaling method known as batching. Batching is a process where transactions are lumped together in order to reduce strain on the Bitcoin blockchain.





When it comes to the amount of transactions that were waiting to be confirmed yesterday, 64,424 certainly sounds like a high number. However, we can quantify the amount of time it would take by looking at the average amount of transactions per block and average Bitcoin block times. Assuming an average of 2,500 transactions per Bitcoin block, and an average block time of ten minutes, it should take approximately 4 hours and twenty minutes to clear 64,424 transactions, assuming new transactions do not cause further congestion in the meantime.







