With its relentless progress, Bitcoin Ordinals is about to challenge Ethereum’s hegemony in the NFT market in terms of sales and active buyers. Data from a well-known NFT industry data aggregator, Crypto Slam, showed sales of Ordinals have increased by an astounding 130% in USD, bringing in close to 10% of the market.
While Ethereum continues to dominate the NFT sector with a sales total of over $24 million, the quick ascent of BTC’s Ordinals raises the possibility of a “flip” in the near future. The Ordinals protocol, which was first introduced in January, quickly climbed the popularity ladder to become the most widely used method of creating new assets on the Bitcoin blockchain.
It first began as a method of “inscribing” data in the witness section of BTC transactions on the smallest units of Bitcoin, called satoshis. But the debut of the BRC-20 token standard in early March is what caused the number of Ordinals inscriptions to skyrocket.
“Bitcoin Request for Comment,” or BRC-20 tokens on the Ordinals protocol, were created by an anonymous on-chain analyst named Domo on March 8th, 2023.
In the latest quarterly report from DappRadar, the establishment of BTC Ordinals inscriptions on the BTC network has amassed more than $210 million in trade volume, but the NFT market kept decreasing.
Bitcoin Ordinals’ Quarterly Rise Was 2894%
The annual average trading volume for BTC rose from $7.18 million in the first quarter to $210.7 million by the end of June. DappRadar reported that the increase for the quarter was a whopping 2834%. The data shows how the sharp rise in demand for Bitcoin Ordinals through the second quarter of 2023 led to a significant increase in transaction volume.
Meanwhile, a total of over 16 million ordinals have been inscribed to date, as per data from Dune Analytics.
Therefore, proposals for a “flippening” might not be too far off given that the ecosystem of non-fungible tokens [NFT] is showing signs of being impacted by the rise of Bitcoin Ordinals. According to sources, BTC will overtake Solana [SOL] to become the second-most popular blockchain by the end of May 2023. Ethereum, on the other hand, leads in terms of NFT trade volumes.