Bitcoin (BTC) Ordinals: you can hardly ignore them anymore. Whether you are in favor or against the new technology, the growth of the service launched in January remains impressive. Ordinals enables inscriptions on Bitcoin’s blockchain, suddenly opening up the network for multiple purposes. While the community is divided into two camps, it is clear which side the Bitcoin miners are on. With the huge increase in network costs, they are the ones who benefit greatly from this.
Bitcoin network costs explode
According to data from Dune the total network fee paid for the new innovation on the Bitcoin network is equal to 1,414 BTC. At the current bitcoin price, this has a value of no less than $ 38.2 million. Compared to April 20, this has increased by an absurd percentage of 700 percent. When the data is compared to April 1, the numbers are even more impressive: costs have shot up by an astonishing 831 percent in almost 7 weeks.
As of April, the vast majority of Bitcoin Ordinals are text-based inscriptions. This has to do with the advent of the BRC-20 token standard that makes it possible to create and trade tokens on the Bitcoin blockchain.
The figures do not lie: the interest in the new possibilities of Bitcoin is immense. According to Dune, the number of inscriptions currently stands at 8.1 million and number launched tokens almost equals 25,000.
Discussions flare up: miners benefit
The hype surrounding non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and BRC-20 tokens reached its peak last week, which at the same time caused negative consequences for the network. While the network was overloaded, transaction costs shot up to enormous heights and Binance even chose to temporarily halt BTC withdrawals for this reason.
For the average user of the network, it is of course undesirable to have to pay a lot to conquer a place in a transaction block. However, the high network costs make it more attractive for bitcoin miners to mine, as they also collect the transaction costs in addition to the block reward. The latter is a positive development for the overall security of the network.
The hype has now subsided somewhat and it is again a lot cheaper to perform transactions on the Bitcoin network.