Bitcoin BRC-20 Tokens Near $1 Billion Market Cap As Exchange Lists ORDI

Meme token fever is sweeping Bitcoin, as the market capitalization of tokens built on top of the leading cryptocurrency’s blockchain approached $1 billion on Monday after ORDI — the very first such token — was listed on major exchanges.

According to brc-20.io, which tracks the nascent market for tokens minted on the Bitcoin blockchain, the market cap of all BRC-20 tokens combined is around $991 million as of this writing. The market has increased in value, as well as the number of tokens in circulation, in recent days.

Short for “Bitcoin Request for Comment,” BRC-20 is an experimental framework for building fungible tokens on Bitcoin using Ordinalsthe protocol that enables people to imprint NFT-like assets on Bitcoin called inscriptions.

The BRC-20 tokens have been around for two months. They were groundbreaking by the pseudonymous on-chain computer enthusiast Domo, who drew inspiration from ERC-20 token standard on Ethereum and launched a token called ORDI on March 8.

Since then, Ordi has reached a market value of around $400 million, according to brc-20.io. Other BRC-20 tokens such as PEPE (a different token than the currently hot Ethereum meme token of the same name), MEME, PIZA and DOMO have followed suit as Bitcoin goes through the kind of meme coin mania that has gripped the broader crypto market previously with Dogecoin, Shiba Inu and BONK.

On Monday, Ordi was listed for trading on Crypto.com and Gate.io, suggesting that the experimental token is gaining mainstream adoption on cryptocurrency exchanges. At the time of writing, the price of Ordi was $18.50 on Gate.ioa notable drop from the high of $29.58 set earlier in the day.

Still, the current price of Ordi represents a sharp increase from its price just a week ago, when Ordi traded hands at $3.78 on May 1, according to brc-20.io.

The volatility of BRC-20 tokens highlights the emerging nature of the Ordinals space, as text-based inscriptions – used to create and exchange tokens – take over and image-based inscriptions become less common. Yesterday, over 399,000 inscriptions were text-based against 20 that were image-based, according to data from Dune.

A record number of daily inscriptions was also recorded yesterday, at over 400,000, pushing the total number of inscriptions made past 4.5 million since the Ordinals protocol took off in late January.

The popularity of BRC-20 tokens has a noticeable impact on Bitcoin transactions overall. On Sunday, 65% of Bitcoin transactions were related to BRC-20 tokens, according to another Dune dashboardand leading crypto exchange Binance briefly halted Bitcoin withdrawals due to network congestion.