Bitcoin Inscriptions See Resurgence, Occupy 40% of Transfers

On-chain data shows that Bitcoin inscriptions have made a comeback after seeing declines earlier, reaching a new all-time high transaction count.

Bitcoin Inscriptions Transaction Share Has Reached a New ATH of 40%

According to data from the analysis company at the chain Glass node, a peak of around 193,000 inscriptions was recorded in a single day recently. “Inscriptions” here refers to an application of the Bitcoin network similar to “non-fungible tokens” (NFT) used on other blockchains.

However, there is a major difference between the inscriptions and the NFTs on other networks such as Ethereum, and that is that the inscriptions are directly written into the blockchain (which is what gave them their name).

That they are stored directly on the chain in this way has implications for the Bitcoin block size and the overall size of the blockchain, as a previous report from Glassnode already discussed.

Since their appearance, the inscriptions have mostly seen an increase in popularity, but earlier this month they faced some decline. However, in recent days, this BTC application has observed a resurgence.

The chart below shows how the number of new inscriptions struck daily has changed since they were started.

The value of the metric seems to have been quite high in recent days | Source: Glassnode on Twitter

As shown in the graph, Inscription transactions recorded their record high numbers recently, when the network observed 193,000 Inscriptions minted in a single day.

The diagram also shows how many of these transactions take place on the network involving which type of inscriptions. There are five main categories here: image, text, sound, video and other.

While image inscriptions were the most popular type in the early days of the technology, the text-based ones seem to have dominated the Bitcoin blockchain recently. The other categories seem to have seen very few mints compared to these two.

As a percentage of the total transactions (of any type) taking place on the BTC network, the Inscriptions occupied a 40% share during their most recent surge in usage.

Looks like the value of the metric has been elevated recently | Source: Glassnode on Twitter

Interestingly, while the inscriptions may have made a comeback recently, the block size share that they have occupied has only continued to decline, as the chart highlights.

Decreasing block size share of the transactions associated with Inscriptions | Source: Glassnode on Twitter

The reason behind this trend lies in the fact that text-based inscriptions have gained momentum recently, which are naturally significantly lighter in terms of data size compared to other types such as image or video.

From the chart below, it is clear that the text Inscriptions currently in the chain has a negligible average size (almost 0 kB), while the image type has an average size of about 13 kB.

The audio type has the largest mean size at around 115 kB | Source: Glassnode on Twitter

BTC price

At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading around $27,700, down 8% in the last week.

BTC has seen significant decline in the last few days | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView

Featured image from Jievani Weerasinghe at Unsplash.com, Charts from TradingView.com, Glassnode.com