Despite the cryptocurrency’s recent price decrease and accusations that the buzz around Bitcoin NFTs has faded, ordinal inscriptions have continued to dominate activity on the Bitcoin network over the past week.
On August 21, Ordinals creator “Leonidas” noted that Bitcoin had 530,788 transactions in the previous 24 hours, with 450,785 of those transactions including Ordinals. “In the midst of everyone proclaiming ‘Ordinals are dead,’ they have literally accounted for 84.9% of Bitcoin activity,” he explained.
Dune Analytics data supports the increase, with over 400,000 ordinal inscriptions on Aug. 20, while Bitinfocharts indicates a daily Bitcoin transaction total of roughly 556,000.
This suggests that on August 20, Ordinals accounted for more than three-quarters of current network activity.
According to Eric Wall, an industry expert, 54% of transactions on the Bitcoin network last week were Ordinals. According to Dune, 25.5 million Ordinal inscriptions have occurred, yielding $53.4 million in fees on the Bitcoin network.
BRC-20 token minting presently dominates inscriptions, with 1.9 million produced last week.
The current data contradict a DappRadar analysis published on Aug. 17 that stated Ordinals NFT usage and sales volume had plummeted since peaking in May, causing some crypto analysts to say the euphoria had “died down.”
The survey, however, only tracked the sales and trading volume of NFTs issued on the Bitcoin network, not the actual inscription activity, which looks to be high.
Bitcoin Ordinals are nonfungible asset artifacts that allow data to be inscribed into a Satoshi, Bitcoin’s smallest division.
The protocol was unveiled in January, and thousands of them were minted on the Bitcoin network in the months that followed. This created congestion and an increase in transaction costs, which peaked in April and May.
