A miner received almost $200,000 in transaction fees after mining 6.701 bitcoin, which exceeded Bitcoin's current block subsidy. This was due to the recent surge of activity on the blockchain related to the Ordinals protocol, which introduced inscriptions that can be added to sequentially numbered satoshis to create unique, non-fungible tokens. However, the popularity of these tokens has congested the Bitcoin network and caused fees to soar, leading some users and exchanges to consider alternatives such as the Lightning Network. The high fees are having an impact on users who rely on base layer payments, and even Lightning requires an initial on-chain transaction that is now out of reach for many due to the prohibitive costs.