Ordinals set a new record on Saturday as the protocol used to enroll digital assets Bitcoin— produce assets comparable to Ethereum-based NFTs– had his busiest day yet.
The daily number of inscriptions made through Ordinals on Saturday was about 223,000, according to a widely used dune dashboard. It marked the first time over 200,000 inscriptions were made in a single day, and suggests that the protocol is as popular as ever since it entered its fifth month ago. launch.
In April alone, the daily record for inscriptions was broken four other times. That included about 72,000 inscriptions on April 2 and 193,000 inscriptions on April 23, according to the Dune dashboard.
At the same time, the number of Bitcoin transactions approached levels not seen in years, according to blockchain analytics firm IntoTheBlock. On Sunday, the firm said the weekly average of daily Bitcoin transactions was around 396,000, the highest level since December 2017.
Looking at some of the latest inscriptions using ordinals.com, what once looked like a sea of images has early on transformed into a wall of text-based inscriptions. The tide began to shift last month as people discovered Ordinals can be used to create fungible tokens on Bitcoin, in a manner analogous to what can be done on Ethereum.
The trend was started by a pseudonymous on-chain computer enthusiast named Domo, who created the “BRC-20” token standard as an experiment. And as of Sunday, close to 6,900 tokens using the newly developed standard have been launched, including several meme tokens with multimillion-dollar market caps, according to data from brc-20.io.
North of 99.8% of the total inscriptions made on Saturday were text-based compared to only 272 image-based inscriptions, which represented 0.1% of the daily total. Although not all textual inscriptions are associated with fungible tokens, the Saturday ratio represents a shift in Ordinals’ use compared to when the month began.
When the daily record for captions was broken on April 4, text-based subscriptions made up just 86% of the daily total, while image-based ones accounted for nearly 13% at 9,273.
Apart from the creation of fungible tokens under the so-called BRC-20 standard, Ordinals opens the door for activity on Bitcoin in other ways, such as Batch name (.sats) standard which is similar naming services built on Ethereum.
On Friday, self-described NFT historian @LeonidasNFT acknowledged the latest developments in the Ordinals space, saying that “ordinals protocol innovation on Bitcoin has increased exponentially.”
Same day, the account celebrated a milestone of its own for Ordinals, as the total number of inscriptions crossed 2 million. Just a couple of days later, the total number of inscriptions is now over 2.5 million, according to Dune dashboard.
“It’s exciting to see inscriptions grow the way they are,” said Ordinal’s Project Communications Director Isabel Foxen Duke Decrypt“I am concerned that these numbers are inflated by a flood of subscription-generated BRC-20 tokens that are highly uncertain and could pose a risk to retail investors.”
In fact, some projects that have quickly embraced the experimental token standard have faced headwinds, such as UniSat Wallet. Shortly after the digital wallet project – which supports inscriptions and BRC-20 tokens – launched its own marketplace, the service was compromised “due to a vulnerability in [its] code base.”
UniSat Wallet indicated that it will compensate users affected by the incident on Twitter, which it said had affected 70 transactions. The project did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Decrypt.
Inscriptions are sometimes referred to as Bitcoin NFTs, but the process of creating inscriptions and how each one’s corresponding data is stored is different compared to digital assets created on blockchains like Ethereum or Solana.
NFTs are unique digital tokens minted using smart contracts, where people interact with code that operates on decentralized protocols. They represent the ownership of an object, often digital art, and while it is possible to store assets such as images on-chain using Ethereum or Solana, most NFTs point to an asset stored off-chain.
l Instead of creating an entirely new token, using Ordinals, people enter content such as images or text into individual Satoshis, the smallest denomination that a Bitcoin can be divided into (1/100,000,000 BTC). And that content is stored directly and permanently on Bitcoin’s blockchain.
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