A few months ago, the mempool was essentially empty.

It was empty for most of the bear market.

Then ordinals filled up the mempools. At times, there were over 200 blocks worth of transactions waiting to be added to the chain.

But now, ordinals are dead and will likely remain dead, but there are still 135 blocks in the mempools.

I’m not complaining, a healthy mempool is good for bitcoin, but what is driving the current transaction volume?

I doubt it is the move from 16k-26k.