The current trend of creating inscriptions on chains other than Bitcoin has led to a significant increase in transaction volumes on several blockchain networks, including Arbitrum and BNB Chain, setting new records. Over the last week, inscriptions have dominated transactions on various networks.
They made up over 91% of transactions on Avalanche, 75% on Gnosis, 65% on Ethereum’s Goerli testnet, 62% on Arbitrum, 58% on ZkSync Era, and over 40% on BNB Chain and Polygon PoS Chain, as per data from Dune Analytics.
This surge in activity has resulted in outages on several networks, including Arbitrum, Avalanche, ZkSync Era, Cronos, The Open Network, and most recently, Celestia. In terms of transaction fees, inscriptions have also had a significant impact. In the past week, over 77% of transaction fees on Avalanche were linked to inscriptions. Similarly, 39% of transaction fees on ZkSync Era, 18% on Arbitrum, 16% on Gnosis, and 13% on BNB Chain were used for inscription transactions.
Over the past two years, the number of transactions on major blockchains has reached unprecedented levels, largely driven by the recent surge in inscriptions. Concurrently, the gas expenditure for creating new inscriptions has also hit record highs.
Inscriptions Mirror Bitcoin Ordinals, Pushing EVM Chains to Capacity
Drawing parallels with Bitcoin Ordinals, users have discovered the ability to create inscriptions using transaction call data on chains based on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). This has opened up possibilities for minting a wide range of items, from memecoins to social media avatars, leading to an increased demand for block space.
On December 19, Kevin Sekniqi, the co-founder of Ava Labs, observed that the Avalanche C-Chain (contract chain) achieved a transaction rate of 977 transactions per second (TPS), causing many EVM chains to reach their capacity.
Sekniqi highlighted that the inscription trend has served as an effective stress test for the current infrastructure, underlining the importance of subnets in managing the additional load.
The surge in inscriptions has led to an increase in traffic on the Bitcoin network. Currently, there are over 338,500 unconfirmed transactions in Bitcoin’s mempool, a significant rise from the 226,000 recorded two weeks ago. As per data from Ordi.io, the Bitcoin blockchain has seen the creation of more than 49.6 million inscriptions.
