It hasn't. The mempool is still empty. Look at the third graph here: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#1,8h. At time of me writing this, the mempool is currently 0.048 MB.
The problem is that everyone is still using wallets and websites to tell them which fee to use, instead of looking for themselves. These services use bad algorithms which are currently still stuck with the assumption that the mempool is over full, and that you absolutely must use the highest fee if you want to be confirmed in the next few blocks. They keep spamming these high fee transactions, causing other users using these services to end up being recommended even higher fees, and the cycle continues. I just checked five or six of the most common "Suggested fee" websites, and was suggested anywhere from 70 sats/vbyte to 216 sats/vbyte. I made a transaction with a fee of 1 sat/vbyte literally 15 minutes ago, and it confirmed in the next block.
Don't listen to any automatic fee recommendation. Look at the mempool and decide for yourself. You'll save yourself a lot of money.
The problem is that everyone is still using wallets and websites to tell them which fee to use, instead of looking for themselves. These services use bad algorithms which are currently still stuck with the assumption that the mempool is over full, and that you absolutely must use the highest fee if you want to be confirmed in the next few blocks. They keep spamming these high fee transactions, causing other users using these services to end up being recommended even higher fees, and the cycle continues. I just checked five or six of the most common "Suggested fee" websites, and was suggested anywhere from 70 sats/vbyte to 216 sats/vbyte. I made a transaction with a fee of 1 sat/vbyte literally 15 minutes ago, and it confirmed in the next block.
Don't listen to any automatic fee recommendation. Look at the mempool and decide for yourself. You'll save yourself a lot of money.
There's a problem that many services that hold user's balances have fixed fees, so they use these terrible fee prediction algorithms without caring at all, since they don't pay out of their pockets anyway. And users just stick with them, because they might not be able to use an alternative for some reason. For example, a lot of exchanges have withdrawal fees in range 0.0005-0.0015 BTC regardless of the state of the mempool. Or how in 2017 Coinbase was refusing to batch their withdrawals, greatly contributing to the network congestion.
