OKX is reportedly transferring thousands of Bitcoin Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO) to their hot wallet. This activity occurs at a cost of more than 10 times the average wage observed in the last 24 hours.
The Bitcoin network is currently experiencing significant congestion, with a staggering number of transactions awaiting confirmation in the mempool. As a result, users are forced to pay over 500 satoshis per byte to execute a transaction immediately, or about $50-100 for an ordinary transfer.
This high fee rate means that a significant portion of the Bitcoin that OKX is trying to consolidate is paid to miners. For example, in one transaction, a fee as high as $15,000 was paid to combine UTXOs with a total value of only $48,000, which is more than 30% of the total value.
Currently the Bitcoin network is plagued with more than 330,000 unconfirmed transactions and memory usage has increased to 1.35 GB. Under these circumstances, OKX is suspected of sorting and harvesting user wallets, a move that has caught the attention of many in the cryptocurrency community.
*This is not investment advice.