Bitcoin NFT Mints Surpass 200,000 — But Is Interest in Ordinals Fading?

Ordinals took the Bitcoin network by storm in January, the hot new thing dominating the conversation around the oldest and largest blockchain. On Monday, the number of Bitcoin subscriptions passed 200,000, according to data from Dune Analytics.

Ordinal inscriptions, similar to NFTs, are digital assets inscribed on a satoshi, the lowest denomination of a Bitcoin (BTC). Writing on satoshis, named after the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, is possible thanks to the Taproot upgrade launched on the Bitcoin network on November 14, 2021.

Thanks to the popularity of Ordinals, fees on the Bitcoin network skyrocketed in the past month, passing $170,500 in enrollment fees alone on February 15, 2023. Over $1.31 million in fees have been paid to miners on the Bitcoin network.

However, since February 15th, the amount of fees paid to Bitcoin miners each day has been steadily dropping to $54,000 on February 20th to currently just over $11,000 at the time of publication.

“Clearly we haven’t been shipping features fast enough to keep the mempool full,” said Ordinals creator Casey Rodarmor, a former Bitcoin Core contributor. Decrypt. “We apologize for our sloth and will rectify the matter in good time.”

Yuga Labs can also help revive the frenzy. The creators of Bored Ape Yacht Club today announced their own series of 300 Ordinals, the highest profile of the technology to date.

Bitcoin transaction fees are determined by the volume of data in the transaction and the speed at which the user wants the transaction completed. Users who want their transactions to go through during high traffic periods may decide to pay additional fees to get their transactions through.

Fees rise when the demand for processing transactions exceeds the supply of miners. On the Bitcoin network, an individual block is 1 MB, meaning miners can only confirm 1 MB of transactions per block.

At the height of the initial craze, users wrote whatever they could that fit within the 1MB block size, including a copy of the original Doom.

On February 7, 2023, over 21,824 Bitcoin NFTs were minted on the network; these inscriptions included text, images, video and audio files. Currently, just over 5,400 text and image inscriptions have taken place.

Meanwhile, the enthusiasm surrounding Ordinals has led developers on other proof-of-work blockchains such as Litecoin and Dogecoin to attempt to copy the project, which launched on January 21.

On February 19, software engineer Anthony Guerrera launched the Litecoin Ordinals project on GitHub after forking the Bitcoin Ordinals GitHub repository.

Guerrera told Decrypt at the time Litecoin was chosen due to being the only other blockchain with similar functionality and the same SegWit and Taproot upgrades as Bitcoin.

Although Ordinal Inscriptions do not require third parties to create, developers at Bitcoin sidechain projects like Stacks have taken this new interest in Bitcoin NFTs to push Ordinal-compatible wallets and marketplaces, of course, powered by their token.