Ordinals Inscriptions Skyrocketed In The NFT Space
By Shubham Joshi
The enthusiasm for trading digital assets shows a substantial and potentially growing number of people remain drawn to the crypto ecosystem in recent times. There’s a sizable rise in activity on the non-fungible tokens (NFTs) side, which to a large extent is caused by the introduction of Ordinals protocol in January 2023.
What are Ordinal Inscriptions! They are similar to NFTs, digital assets inscribed on a satoshi, the lowest denomination of Bitcoin (BTC). The Taproot upgrade, which went live on the Bitcoin network on November 14, 2021, made it possible to create satoshis, which are named after the Bitcoin developer who goes by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto.
In just five months of introduction, Ordinals protocol has quickly risen to the top position as the method for minting new assets on the Bitcoin network.
Interestingly, in less than a week after the project’s inventor resigned from his position as caretaker, the number of Ordinal inscriptions on the Bitcoin network has topped 10 million.
Some rub-on effect is also experienced on other protocols that remained subdued over a period of time. Since May 2, 2023, the number of daily transactions on the Litecoin (LTC) network, the second oldest cryptocurrency after BTC, has increased by an amount never seen before.
A majority of 2022 and the first few months of 2023 saw Litecoin’s daily transaction volume fluctuate between 90,000 and 130,000 transactions, with peaks of 150,000 to 175,000 occasionally occurring.
Ordinal inscriptions account for a sizable fraction of Litecoin transactions, with a large uptick earlier this month when 2.58 million inscriptions were minted on the blockchain. The number of Litecoin-based inscriptions currently stands at 3,841,215 inching closer to the 4 million threshold.
Rival protocols too joined the bandwagon. Dogecoin users have imitated the Ordinals structure from Bitcoin and built their very own “Doginals”. These tokens, which resemble Bitcoin ordinals and are similar to NFTs but do not use smart contracts, are the newest craze commonly knowns as BRC-20, which have been in the headlines for the last few weeks.
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