Over 100,000 Ordinals minted on Bitcoin, causing cheers and network congestion

The number of Ordinal inscriptions passed 100,000 late Tuesday, proving that the project to bring digital assets native to the Bitcoin blockchain continues to fascinate the crypto space since its launch last month.

The 100,000 milestone was closely watched, and comes less than a day after Ordinals crossed the 75,000 inscription mark, according to a Dune report, with transaction fees for the digital collectibles of $114,590 earlier today.

As Ordinals surged toward the six-figure mark, memory usage per block exceeded the standard 300MB capacity by 86MB, causing the network to purge any transaction less than 1.74 sats/vB, or Satoshi per byte, according to data from Bitcoin Explorer, Mempool.

Although the Bitcoin network had to adapt to the massive increase in traffic, many Bitcoin faithful continued to see the Ordinal project as good for the number one blockchain by market capitalization according to CoinGecko.

“What the team came up with with Ordinals is genius,” Alex Miller, CEO of Hiro, a developer of tier-2 smart contract platform Stacks, told Decrypt in an interview. “It’s the super core of the Bitcoin ethos in that they basically took several different things and put them together in a way that the original creators didn’t foresee or expect.”

Unlike Ethereum or Solana NFTs that use smart contracts, Ordinals are written directly onto individual Satoshis, the lowest denomination of a Bitcoin, named after the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. Because Ordinals lack smart contract support and programmability, many in the Stacks community see the increase as a general benefit to Bitcoin sidechain developers.

“There are a lot of limits to how much data you can put into an Ordinal store, and that’s really where we see Stacks coming in and really expanding,” Miller said, adding that Ordinals have proven to be massive demand to be able to use NFTs on Bitcoin.

Ordinals are also still in their early stages, lacking several key features for long-term growth. These include a seamless way to enter Ordinals without having to sync the entire Bitcoin blockchain, marketplaces for buying and selling digital items, and wallets that allow collectors to view Ordinals – something Hiro and other developers are working furiously to launch.

“The Stacks community has been saying for so long that things should be built on Bitcoin,” Miller continued. “Because it’s the most reliable thing that’s been around the longest, it’s not going anywhere.”

Despite the excitement surrounding Ordinals, Miller acknowledged that the Bitcoin blockchain was not intended to be used this way, noting the lack of programmability of the blockchain, unlike Ethereum, which has programmability built into it.

Ethereum NFTs are still early in their lifecycle as well, Miller notes, and says he doesn’t see Ordinals as a challenge to Ethereum’s dominance in the NFT space. However, he says that on-chain data storage will make the Bitcoin blockchain a popular place to enter important information such as deeds, real estate transactions or public documents.

“I do not think so [Ordinals] is going to be a one-to-one replacement for Ethereum NFTs,” Miller said. .”