Bitcoin Ordinals have continued their giant strides, clocking over 10 million inscriptions in less than six months. A total of 1578.46 BTC in fees, or around 44 million US dollars, have been paid, of which more than 80% are linked to BRC-20.
Roughly, 200k ordinals inscriptions are now being minted each day, according to data from dune analytics.
The new feat comes shortly after Casey Rodarmor, the developer of ordinals, drop out of the project and handed over the control to coder Raphjaph on May 28.
The Ordinals protocol was launched in January and quickly rose through the popularity ranks to become the most widely used method of creating new assets on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Originally started as a method of “inscribing” data in the witness section of BTC transactions, satoshis are the lowest divisible unit of BTC that can be written onto.
The introduction of the BRC-20 token standard in early March was what actually caused the number of Ordinals inscriptions to soar.
“Bitcoin Request for Comment” or BRC-20 tokens on the Ordinals protocol created by an anonymous on-chain analyst named Domo on March 8th, 2023.
As per the Bitcoin manual, the BRC-20 is an experimental fungible token that utilizes Ordinal inscriptions of JSON data to deploy token contracts, mint tokens, and transfer tokens.
Simply put, it’s a method for storing a script file in BTC that can be used to associate tokens with satoshis and then permit those tokens to flow from one user to another.
Bitcoin Is Now The 10th Largest NFT Blockchain
Even though Ordinals is only a few months old, their impact is already making waves. It comes as no surprise that “Bitcoin NFTs” have occupied the majority chunk among the top earners of NFT sales volume, with both well-known brands and iconic projects finding a home on the blockchain.
The well-known NFT industry data aggregator CryptoSlam recently reported that BTC has comfortably taken tenth place among the top all-time NFT blockchains by sales volume.
Of course, Bitcoin needs to trade aggressively to defeat Ethereum and claim the top spot. The calls for a “flippening” may not be that far off, though, with BRC20 tokens leading the Ordinals ecosystem, inscriptions getting close to 11 million, and the number of Bitcoin NFTs rising month after month.