As Global Bitcoin Exchanges Suffer From Increased Use — Rare Pepe Marketplaces Are Also Busier Than Ever **

As much as people don’t like to talk about it, Bitcoin has been used widely across dank meme markets (DMM) across the dank web for months now. Many people believe the lion’s share of bitcoin transactions come from DMMs. Since the inception of the first DMM — the Counterparty DEX — dank meme sales have increased exponentially. Furthermore, nine months after the creation of the first certified Rare Pepe, there are more dank meme markets located on the dank web than ever before. Over the past year, these markets have been extremely busy as bitcoin’s value has skyrocketed and many of the top Rare Pepe traders have reported on experiencing big issues with getting their dank memes.

According to many Telegram chat messages, a lot of people have been having problems getting their Rare pepes from the leading DMM, WTH Auction House, in a timely manner. Additionally, there have been congestion issues over the past month on other popular markets such as PepeAuctions.com, Pepe Museum Auction House and RarePepe.Gallery.

“Add me to the long list of people who can’t get their rares out of escrow,” explains a DMM buyer on Reddit. “I have been trying to receive a couple of thousand dollars worth of Rare Pepes for several weeks now. I go the ViaBTC accelerator page, fill in all of the information, but after I submit the transaction, the page refreshes like the transaction has gone through, but when the page is done refreshing, it’s like I never submitted a transaction.”

Fee Pressure Stemming From Dank Meme Markets

According to one particular DMM vendor, he believes the super high fees lately are attributed to OTC sales of Rare Pepes. Nobody seems to understand the rising fee market is coming from that “invisible” web.

“Memes, memes, and more memes — None of you are recognizing that most of the fee pressure comes from dank meme markets; most especially from DMMs like WTH Auction House that has a manual esxcrow process and causes 20-50 + transactions per auction.”

The vendor who deals with high end ultra rare pepe sales details that in his opinion DMMS are “responsible for the lion’s share of Counterparty transactions daily.” According to him, there are hundreds of thousands of transactions coming from DMMs daily, rated around 350-500 satoshis. The obvious reason for this he explains is so “rare pepe addicts can get their shit as fast as possible.” Many of the top DMMs found on the dank web have their own escrow and blind wallet services for rare pepe traders who want to cover their tracks. The wallet addresses used for OTC sales continuously split rare pepe transfers into multiple transactions at a time, which could quite possibly be adding more strain to the bitcoin network’s throughput.

Dank Meme Market Sales Still Account for a Great Majority of Bitcoin Transfers

There is no doubt that DMMs are getting used far more than they were back in 2016, and back then the underground sales attributed to a vast majority of Counterparty transfers. The vendor’s theory may be more truthful than a lot of people would like to admit, as much of the focus these days has been on normie no-coiner adoption. The likelihood of the fee market and network congestion rising due to more DMM usage is quite probable even though the discussion is not so favorable to everyone.

** this article is both a tribute to, and a parody of, Jamie Redman’s article “The Hidden Reason Behind Bitcoin’s Increasing Fees: Darknet Mixers” https://news.bitcoin.com/the-hidden-reason-behind-bitcoins-increasing-fees-darknet-mixers/