Due to the recently announced “token standard” for the blockchain, the number of Ordinals inscribed on the Bitcoin $27,769 network has reached a new daily all-time high (ATH).
According to Dune Analytics statistics, Bitcoin Ordinals hit 58,179 inscriptions on April 2, surpassing the previous all-time high (ATH) of 31,692 on March 9. The recent development of “Bitcoin Request for Comment” (BRC-20) tokens on the Ordinals protocol by a pseudonymous on-chain analyst named Domo in early March is thought to have fueled the spike.
While Ordinals are nonfungible token (NFT)-like “digital artifacts” on the Bitcoin network that carry data in the form of text, JPEG images, PDFs, video, and audio formats, the BRC-20 token standard, like Ethereum’s ERC-20 token standard, uses Ordinal inscriptions to deploy token contracts, mint tokens, and transfer tokens.
The Taproot soft fork permitted the launch of Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens on Bitcoin on November 14, 2021. According to “Leonidis.og,” the host of an Ordinals-focused podcast, over 55,000 of the inscriptions on April 2 were text-based Ordinals, many of which were represented by BRC-20 tokens.
Leonidis explained in a tweet that the April 2 rise was caused by the recent release of new tools for interacting with BRC-20 tokens. “There was a lot of enthusiasm behind BRC-20 when it released a month ago, but the anticipation finally died down.” During the downtime, we created tools to make communicating with BRC-20 more easier, and we’re now seeing ATH interest. It’s something I’ve said before and will say again. UX is important! ”
Ord.io, UniSat Wallet, and BRC-20.io are among the new tools. With the creation of the BRC-20 standard, 1,600 tokens have been issued, according to BRC-20.io.
Among the most popular BRC-20 tokens are “pepe,” “ordi,” and “punk,” which have market capitalization of $2.5 million, $2.1 million, and $900,000, respectively.
Over 42,700 BRC-20 tokens have been created in the previous 24 hours, the majority of which have come from the tokens wzrd, domo, BAYC, meme, and puppies.
While the market cap of BRC-20 tokens is now less than $10 million, Galaxy Digital, a digital asset investment firm, predicts the “Bitcoin NFT” market could reach $4.5 billion by 2025.
The Bitcoin community is still divided on whether Ordinals is a good fit for the Bitcoin ecosystem. Proponents such as Dan Held argue that it expands the financial use cases for Bitcoin, while detractors argue that it departs from Satoshi Nakamoto’s vision of Bitcoin as a peer-to-peer currency system.
