Just when many thought that the Ordinals hype had already been extinguished, the protocol built within the Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain comes rallying again, bringing about more activity in the network but also kicking in higher transaction fees.
Ordinals are Back
Last Thursday, the Bitcoin network was rocked by surging activity coupled with rising fees. The culprit here was the resurgence of Ordinals due to seemingly renewed market appetite by enthusiasts.
As a recap, Ordinals Protocol was formulated by Casey Rodarmor, allowing data to be infused in a Satoshi (Sat)—the smallest denomination of Bitcoin. Ordinals are similar to how non-fungible tokens (NFT) on the Ethereum (ETH) chain work, but their proponents and users have taken a great deal of effort differentiating the two by referring to the former as Bitcoin-native Digital Artifacts. The distinction was apparently very important for them because of the “tainted” nature of NFTs, which were prone to scams.
The peak of the transactions came on November 16 and 18, which consequently pumped average fees to $18.647 and $18.378, respectively, based on BitInfoChart’s three-month data. Prior to that, a notable uptick was noticed a week before with the charges bumping at $15.865. As of Monday, the numbers have gone down but at $10.346, they are still higher than the average fees on the second half of the year.
All these times, Ethereum was playing catch up and mirroring Bitcoin’s movements in the three-month bracket, except for the November 16 and 18 events. During the 9th, ETH spiked to $10.529 and has overtaken BTC by $2.018 on the 13th. However, it eventually diverged from the premier crypto by market dominance on the 16th and 18th, displaying $7.989 and $4.888 transaction fees, accordingly.
The data is reinforced by Dune Analytics charts indicating a dramatic increase in Ordinal inscriptions since October 24. On that date, more than six million Ordinals were inscribed, catapulting the total network fees to 800 BTC or around $30 million.
As of this writing at 3:30 PM UTC time on Tuesday, there are now a total of 42.67 million Ordinal inscriptions on the BTC network.
ORDI Tokens and Taproot Wizards Capitalizing on Ordinals Resurgence
The reinvigorated Ordinals demand gave way to the listing of ORDI on Binance on November 7. The inclusion of the second largest BRC-20 token by market cap on the crypto exchange resulted in a buying spree, pumping its price by 50% at that time.
Additionally, the renewed in Ordinals sprouted a $7.5 million seed from the November 17 funding round of Taproot Wizards, an Ordinals-based project led by Rodarmor.