Ordinals Transaction Fees Unchanged as Daily Inscriptions Volume Sets Two-Month High

The Ordinals ecosystem marked another significant milestone over the weekend as daily Ordinals inscriptions surged, tracking the second-highest count in history. The remarkable growth registered as two successive three-day streaks of an increasing volume of inscriptions starting last Monday.

Source: Dune Analytics

Data from DeFi and NFT data provider Dune Analytics shows Ordinals activity soared over the weekend, with 385,920 inscriptions made on Sunday. The notable 24-hr activity represents the second-busiest day for the network after May 7, when over 400,000 inscriptions were registered on the network in a similar period.

Renewed hype around Ordinals

Notwithstanding their encroaching influence on the broader Bitcoin ecosystem, Ordinals transaction fees have remained low for the most part. Dune’s Ordinal fees dashboard shows that the daily fees paid has yet to surpass 3 BTC since the start of the month. Markedly, Ordinals inscriptions have traced a parabolic curve while fees have seen consistency at the current low levels – the daily fee figure remained below 10 BTC across June.

Text-based inscriptions still make up the most popular type, accounting for over 13.2 million inscriptions, roughly 81% of the total inscribed count of 16.3 million. DappRadar noted in its quarterly report that Bitcoin Ordinals trading volume across Q2 slightly surpassed $210 million – a staggering 2800+% increase from the $7.18 million volume recorded in Q1. May, in particular, saw a fast rate of onboarding users across various marketplaces resulting in Bitcoin eclipsing Solana to become the second-most popular NFT blockchain in NFT trading volume behind Ethereum.

Source: CryptoSlam

Meanwhile, Bitcoin miners drew in $184 million (more than the total for 2022) across the first half of 2023 boosted by the popularity of Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens. The rising popularity of Ordinals has been catalyzed by the rise of diverse Ordinal-related use cases like BRC-20, bitmap, and recursive inscriptions. Further, its market reception has been boosted by support from crypto companies and projects.

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Ordinals implications – BRC-20, BRC-69 and Ethscriptions

BRC-20 tokens, Bitcoin’s version of ERC-20 tokens, makes use of JSON ordinals to create and share new fungible tokens on top of the Bitcoin blockchain. Last week, Ordinals-based BRC-20 tokens expanded to the Ethereum network. Popular ORDI and OXBT tokens can now be bridged, resulting in a BRC-20 Curated Collection tradeable on OpenSea and Blur marketplaces.

In June, Bitmaps proposed a novel open-source standard leveraging the Bitcoin blockchain that allows for transformation of Bitcoin blocks into integral parts of a metaverse. The protocol enables individuals to claim ownership of Bitcoin Blocks – inscription of ownership onto a Satoshi. ‘. bitmap’ inscriptions currently rank first among Ordinal names in daily inscription counts, data from Ordinals domain service platform iDclub shows.

In the same week, Bitcoin Ordinals launchpad platform Luminex proposed a BRC-69 standard – a modified version of the Ordinals-based BRC-20 token standard. The project proposes to employ ‘recursive inscriptions’ as a way to use a unique syntax to request the content of other inscriptions. The ability to recycle data from already existing inscriptions not only lowers costs but also allows users to bypass the 4-megabyte block limit.

Bitcoin Ordinals launchpad platform Luminex claimed that the simplified creation of recursive Ordinals optimizes block space as the number of inscriptions grows and reduces the cost of inscription by 90%. The recursive inscriptions approach is an ideal solution to scenarios where the Bitcoin network becomes clogged, as witnessed at the height of Ordinal’s hype.

Vitalik remarks on the influence of Ordinals

The adoption of Ordinals, just like fungible and non-fungible tokens on Ethereum, has increased activity on the Bitcoin network. YChart’s Bitcoin transactions per day chart shows the number of daily transactions on the network surged to a then yearly-high of 421,130 in the first of the week before setting an all-time high of 682,281 in early May. This count surpassed the 600,000 mark again on May 10 and May 14 before decreasing in the coming weeks until last weekend when the on-chain activity translated to 594,256 on July 9.

The latest spike follows the launch of the BRC-69 token standard, which underpins recursive ordinal inscriptions. In a July 6 Twitter Space, Ethereum co-creator Vitalik Buterin hailed the Ordinals project as a display of builder culture.

“Ordinals are starting to bring back a culture of actually doing things,” Buterin said in a July 7 Twitter Space with Eric Wall and Udi Wertheimer.

The trio also discussed other subjects in the nearly two-hour session, including Bitcoin’s Lightning Network and zero-knowledge rollups.

The advent of Ordinals recently inspired a similar protocol on the Ethereum network dubbed Ethscriptions, which creates unique NFT-like artifact objects, albeit cheaper than actual NFTs, using transactional call data on the main chain. The project launched mid-June to a huge success, according to its developer Tom Lehman and currently supports the creation of digital images that are then stored on-chain provided the file used doesn’t exceed 96 kilobytes (KB). OpenSea data shows that the Ordinals-like ESC-20 tokens on Ethereum have a trading volume of 622 ETH.

To learn more about Ethereum, check out our Investing in Ethereum guide.