For the second time in a row, the world’s largest crypto Bitcoin exceeded the $24k mark. BTC surged to a 6-month high defying the traders’ gloomy outlook.
With the price surge, a leading on-chain data platform also observed a mild increase in whale addresses indicating a rise in stakeholder trust.
The increase is the biggest one-day gain in about a month. Other leading altcoins such as Ether, Cardano, and Polkadot also rallied.
Bitcoin has come a long way from the prolonged bear market of 2022 to its rally throughout January 2023. But owing to negative regulatory developments, the dominant coin has retraced back to its late 2020 levels.
Crypto prices have been buffeted in recent weeks by a combination of US Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement actions, warnings, and speculation of additional regulatory measures.
Kraken reached a settlement last week to end its staking product, while Paxos halted the issuance of its Binance-branded BUSD token, raising concern that other stablecoins such as Circle’s USDC token were facing regulatory action.
But the recent resurgence has surprised the bearish investor mood. Let’s explore why.
As reported by TronWeekly, for the first time in Bitcoin’s 14 years of existence, the emergence of a new class of assets has boosted Bitcoin’s network activity and increased fee pressure.
The primary source of this uptick is none other than Ordinals, which carry a larger payload of data and new active users.
Ordinals Drove Bitcoin’s Network Usage
The introduction of Ordinals—Bitcoin nonfungible tokens [NFTs]—has even propelled the total number of addresses with non-zero balances to a new record high of 44.06 million addresses.
Furthermore, the upper range of the mean block size increased from a consistent 1.5 to 2.0MB to between 3.0 and 3.5MB during the past week, demonstrating the tremendous influence that ordinals have had on the mean block size.
Terming it a “new and unique moment in Bitcoin history”, Glassnode observed that this is the first time where an “innovation is generating network activity without a classical transfer of coin volume for monetary purposes”.
In the latest update, Bitcoin wallet Xverse has too jumped on the bandwagon and launched support for Ordinals.
According to the tweet, this can be purchased through the app with just some Bitcoins to cover transaction fees. The number of Inscriptions [similar to NFTs] minted using Ordinals has surpassed 110k.
