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The number of Ordinals inscriptions on the Bitcoin (BTC) network has witnessed another meteoric rise, nearly doubling from 2.5 million to 4.78 million in just the past eight days.
While the Ordinals protocol was originally used to create images as non-fungible tokens (NFTs), users have begun to realize that they can use text labels to create fungible tokens similar to those minted using the ERC-20 token standard on the Ethereum (ETH) network .
These text base labels, now popularized as the BRC-20 token standard, have been the main reason for the surge in Ordinals labels on the Bitcoin blockchain.
As Glassnode co-founder and CTO Rafael Schulze-Kraft highlighted on Twitter, text overlays are currently the most popular form of Ordinals overlays, with over 2.8 million text overlays created as of May 5.
8/ In fact, text inscriptions are now the most prominent Ordinal inscription type in the #Bitcoin network.
Text: 2.8M
Images: 650k
Video: 1.8k
Audio: 347
Other: 19kInscriptions Dashboard: https://t.co/YKwAbthEXL pic.twitter.com/O12MZj0qLT
— Rafael Schultze-Kraft (@n3ocortex) May 4, 2023
More recent data from the popular blockchain data center Dune Analytics shows that since April 25, the vast majority (99%) of all new Ordinals inscriptions have been text.
Dubbed brc-20.io, a new tool that allows users to track BRC-20 tokens has a total of 14,200 new tokens currently on the Bitcoin blockchain. The most popular bitcoin-based tokens include “ordi”, “nals”, and even a bitcoin-based version of the now infamous Pepe memcoin (PEPE), which ranks 3rd by total market capitalization.
While the total market capitalization of BRC-20 tokens is currently hovering around the $700 million mark, digital asset investment company Galaxy Digital claims that the Bitcoin NFT market could reach $4.5 billion by 2025.
Related: fixing Bitcoin Ordinals community debate after inscription validation error
The rise in ordinals over the past few months continues to fuel debate about whether ordinals are ultimately a positive for the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Some Bitcoin proponents, such as Dan Held, argue that ordinals offer a wider range of financial uses for Bitcoin, while more hardline Bitcoin proponents argue that ordinals deviate from the original vision of Satoshi Nakamoto, who intended to use Bitcoin as an electronic, peer-to-peer system. . peer-to-peer cash system.
Meanwhile, miners have received a huge influx of revenue due to transaction fees associated with the surge of new activity on the network.
