The number of Ordinals inscriptions on the Bitcoin $27,640 network has nearly doubled in the last eight days, nearly doubling from 2.5 million to 4.78 million. While the Ordinals protocol was initially used to mint images as non-fungible tokens (NFTs), users soon realized that they could utilize text-based inscriptions to produce fungible tokens similar to those minted via the Ethereum (ETH) network’s ERC-20 token standard.
These text base inscriptions, now known as the BRC-20 token standard, are primarily responsible for the enormous increase in Ordinals inscriptions on the Bitcoin blockchain.
According to Rafael Schultze-Kraft, co-founder and CTO of Glassnode, text-based inscriptions are now the most common type of Ordinals inscription, with over 2.8 million text-based inscriptions as of May 5.
According to more current statistics from renowned blockchain data center Dune Analytics, the vast majority (99%) of all new Ordinals inscriptions have been text-based after April 25.
According to brc-20.io, a new application that allows users to track BRC-20 tokens, there are currently 14,200 new tokens housed on the Bitcoin blockchain. Among the most popular Bitcoin-based tokens are “ordi”, “nals”, and even a Bitcoin-based version of the now-famous memecoin Pepe (PEPE), which is ranked third in terms of total market valuation.
While the overall market worth of BRC-20 tokens is now around $700 million, Galaxy Digital, a digital asset investment firm, claims that the market for “Bitcoin NFTs” could reach $4.5 billion by 2025.The growth of Ordinals in recent months has sparked debate about whether they are ultimately beneficial to the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Some Bitcoin supporters, such as Dan Held, argue that Ordinals provides a broader range of financial use cases for Bitcoin, whereas more ardent Bitcoin supporters argue that Ordinals departs from Satoshi Nakamoto’s original vision of Bitcoin as an electronic, peer-to-peer cash system.
Meanwhile, miners have seen a massive increase in revenue as a result of transaction fees associated with the surge of new activity on the network.
