Are Bitcoin Ordinals the Catalyst for a BTC Bull Market? – MicroStrategy’s Saylor thinks so ⋆ ZyCrypto

• The ongoing banking crisis and hyperinflation are the other catalysts Saylor believes could increase the use of Bitcoin.
• Ordinals have caused an increase in activity on the top blockchain.

Bitcoin’s famed maximalist and co-founder of MicroStrategy, Michael Saylor, says the recent enthusiasm around Ordinals is a catalyst for Bitcoin adoption.

Speaking on the PBD Podcast, Saylor added that the rising incidence of bank failures, skyrocketing inflation and regulators’ clampdown on digital assets were the other key factors that could drive the next bull run.

“Anytime someone builds an application that’s cool on Bitcoin, like all the Ordinals and inscriptions and whatever drives up transaction fees, that’s a catalyst,” he said, adding that “a company like Microstrategy buys another $100 million worth of bitcoin,” is also a catalyst.

In fact, Ordinals is taking Bitcoin and the entire crypto space by storm, judging by the recent increase in activities reported on the blockchain. The feature appeared at the beginning of the year and allows users to store media on the blockchain by entering data in the smallest unit of bitcoin, the Satoshi, as non-fungible tokens.

The result has been a jump in transaction fees for transferring bitcoins on the network. According to BitInfoCharts, the average Bitcoin transaction fee was $20 at press time, representing a jump of more than 500% before May 2023.

Ordinals Push BTC transaction fees for miners above the mining rewards

Also, for the first time since 2017, some Bitcoin miners received more rewards for validating transactions on the blockchain than they did for minting new tokens, thanks to Ordinals.

A new fungible standard, BRC-20, introduced in March on top of Ordinals, has also brought new use cases of the Bitcoin blockchain to meme tokens. The current market cap of BRC-20 tokens, according to brc-20.io, is more than $500 million.

Colin Harper, head of content for mining pool Luxor Technologies, agrees with Saylor regarding the potential of Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens. Recently, he commented that the development is a “cool example of how just when you think Bitcoin has become boring, something is waiting around the corner that surprises everyone.”

MicroStrategy added 7,500 bitcoins last quarter, bringing its total holdings to 140,000, according to the firm’s financial results for the first quarter of 2023. The company also reported that its impairment loss on digital assets had narrowed to $18.9 million from $197.6 million last year quarter.