Recently there has been a trend of inscribing data on the bitcoin chain representing issuance of new assets and in some cases media (images etc.). Keywords here are "inscriptions" "ordinals" "brc-20"

The speculation component of these new asset types has has created a high fee environment where instead of paying for bitcoin moving around, ownership of secondary assets encoded as data are being transferred.

There is currently a big controversy where one tribe says that these transactions are spam and should be banned via opt in from miners.