As per the recent development, the total number of Ordinals Inscriptions on the Bitcoin network has doubled from 2.5 million to almost 4.8 million in the previous eight days. The Ordinals protocol was initially launched to mint images as NFTs, but it was only a matter of time till users began to realize that they could use text-based inscriptions to create these NFTs. However, the way was pretty much the same in comparison to those minted using the ERC-20 standard on the Ethereum network.
The text-based inscriptions, now classified as BRC-20 tokens, are responsible for the massive surge in Ordinals Inscriptions on the Bitcoin network. The co-founder and CTO of Glassnode, Rafael Schultze-Kraft highlighted that these text-based inscriptions have become a popular form of Ordinals Inscriptions, accounting for more than 2.8 million as of May 5.
7/ Separating transactions related to text inscriptions from all other #Bitcoin transactions, we clearly see that they are sole driver for the recent increase in Bitcoin activity – even surpassing the total number of all other transactions for a brief amount of time. pic.twitter.com/elXlT4zbPt
— Rafael Schultze-Kraft (@n3ocortex) May 4, 2023
At the same time, data from Dune Analytics highlights that a whopping 99% of all Ordinals have been text-based since April 25.
Schultze-Kraft further added,
“Those BRC20 inscriptions have an influence on the #Bitcoin fee market as well. Yesterday, a total of $3.5m were paid in transaction fees to miners. This is the highest value in two years (#BTC price back then: $38k).”
According to brc-20.io, a new tool that empowers users to seamlessly track BRC-20 tokens, there are currently a total of approximately 14,200 tokens on the Bitcoin network. Currently, the total market cap of BRC-20 tokens continues to hover around the $700 million mark. Moreover, analysts in the crypto market speculate that the market for Bitcoin NFTs would inevitably surge to reach a whopping $4.5 billion by 2025.
Opinions Surrounding Bitcoin Ordinals Inscriptions
Ordinals continued to rise not too long after its launch in the wider crypto market but have continued to spark a debate among crypto geeks. It is argued whether or not Ordinals would prove to be beneficial for the Bitcoin ecosystem in the longer run.
Some argue that Ordinals is bound to take Bitcoin into the world of other uses, including financial use cases for the cryptocurrency, and some of them argue that Ordinals is stripping away the original purpose of Bitcoin, which was initially expected to be used as an electronic, peer-to-peer cash system.
Apart from the ongoing arguments in the crypto space, it won’t be fair to deny that the introduction of Ordinals has generated massive revenue as a result of the transaction fees related to the burst of new activity on the network. The hype surrounding Ordinals is still on the higher side and is expected to stay that way for the time being.
