Ordinal registrations are approaching 4.8 million, almost doubling in just over a week

by James · May 8, 2023

The number of Ordinals inscriptions on the Bitcoin (BTC) network has witnessed another meteoric rise, almost doubling from 2.5 million to 4.78 million in just the last eight days.

While the Ordinals protocol was originally used to mint images as non-fungible tokens (NFTs), users began to realize that they could use text-based inscriptions to create exchangeable tokens in a similar way to what they minted via the ERC-20 token standard on the Ethereum (ETH) network.

The total number of Bitcoin Ordinals inscriptions since December 14th. Source: Dune Analytics.

These textbase inscriptions, now popularized as the BRC-20 token standard, have been the main reason for a massive increase in Ordinals inscriptions on the Bitcoin blockchain.

As highlighted by Glassnode co-founder and CTO, Rafael Schultze-Kraft on Twitter, the text-based inscriptions are now the most popular form of Ordinals inscriptions, with more than 2.8 million text-based inscriptions as of May 5th.

Recent data from popular blockchain data hub Dune Analytics shows that since April 25, the overwhelming majority (99%) of all new Ordinals inscriptions have been text-based.

Ordinal entries by type since 14 December. Source: Dune Analytics.

According to a new tool that allows users to track BRC-20 tokens called brc-20.io, there are currently a total of 14,200 new tokens on the Bitcoin blockchain. Considered among the most popular Bitcoin-based tokens are “ordi”, “nals” and even a Bitcoin-based version of the now infamous memecoin Pepe (PEPE) which is listed as number 3 by total market capitalization.

The total number of BRC-20 tokens currently available. Source: brc20.io.

While the total market capitalization of BRC-20 tokens currently hovers around $700 million, digital investment firm Galaxy Digital claims that the market for “Bitcoin NFTs” could reach $4.5 billion by 2025.

Related: Bitcoin Ordinal’s Community Debates fix for inscription validation error

The rise of Ordinals in recent months has continued to spark debate about whether Ordinals are ultimately positive for the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Some Bitcoin supporters like Dan Held claim that Ordinals offer a wider spread of economic use cases for Bitcoin, while more die-hard Bitcoiners argue that Ordinals deviates from the original vision of Satoshi Nakamoto, who intended Bitcoin to be used as an electronic peer-to-peer cash system.

Meanwhile, miners have enjoyed a huge influx of income due to the transaction fees associated with the burst of new activity on the network.