Since the beginning of this year, it has been possible to use the Ordinals service relatively easily Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) on the Bitcoin blockchain. It has become extremely popular in a short time, and today a new milestone has been reached. In just 8 days, the number of ‘inscriptions’ on Bitcoin has almost doubled.
Ordinals’ Bitcoin inscriptions doubled
Where there were a total of about 2.6 million inscriptions on the network eight days ago, there are already just over 5 million at the time of writing, according to data from Dune. So that’s almost double. The service has clearly grown exponentially. On April 8, the young service broke through the 1 million mark. Before February started, the average Bitcoiner could not even use the service, so the number of subscriptions before that time was nil.
To be precise, “encryptions” include not only NFTs, but also other tokens under the BRC-20 standard. This allows you to mint other shareable tokens on Bitcoin, just like you can create ERC-20 coins on Ethereum. So Bitcoin (BTC) has actually become a competitor for Ethereum (ETH).
Ordinals controversial due to high costs
But Ordinals has caused a lot of controversy. Bitcoin’s original purpose was to be a kind of digital gold. Minting other tokens was not exactly on the agenda, according to some Bitcoin proponents, this diverts the network from its original purpose.
It is easy to see that Ordinals has a huge influence. In February, it already led to the network being very active. That was positive for bitcoin miners, because the transaction costs also increased.
But last Sunday, the obstacles rose to the top. Compared to April 23, transaction costs had increased by a factor of 21, and the network was rumored to be under attack. The number of transactions still to be processed was so high that Binance temporarily stopped all withdrawals.