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Bitcoin NFT Mints Surpass 200K- Are Ordinals Losing Popularity?

Posted on the 28 February 2023 by Nftnewspro
Bitcoin NFT mints surpass 200K- are Ordinals losing popularity

In less than two weeks, miner fees plummeted from $170,000 to $11,000; however, a new Yuga Labs project may spark things back up.

Ordinals stormed the Bitcoin network in January, becoming the hottest topic of discussion on the oldest and largest blockchain. According to data from Dune Analytics, the number of Bitcoin Inscriptions surpassed 200,000 on Monday.

Similar to NFTs, Ordinal Inscriptions are digital assets inscribed on a satoshi, the smallest unit of Bitcoin (BTC). Thanks to the Taproot upgrade introduced on the Bitcoin network on November 14, 2021, satoshis, which are named after the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, can be inscribed.

The prominence of Ordinals has caused Bitcoin network fees to skyrocket over the past month, with inscription fees alone surpassing $170,500 on February 15, 2023. Over $1.31 million has been paid in Bitcoin network mining fees.

Since February 15, however, the daily fees paid to Bitcoin miners have steadily decreased, falling from $54,000 on February 20 to just over $11,000 at the time of publication.

“Clearly we have not been shipping features fast enough to keep the mempool full,” Ordinals creator Casey Rodarmor, a former Bitcoin Core contributor, told Decrypt. “We regret our sloth and will rectify the matter in due time.”

How can Yuga Labs have an effect?

Yuga Labs may also help revive the frenzy. The creators of The Bored Ape Yacht Club announced today that it will have its own series of 300 Ordinals. This is the most well-known use of the technology to date.

The volume of data in the transaction and the speed with which the user wants their transaction completed determine Bitcoin transaction fees. Users can choose to pay more fees if they want their transactions to go through when there are a lot of other transactions going on.

Fees go up when there aren’t enough miners to handle all the transactions. Each block on the Bitcoin network is 1MB, which means that miners can only confirm 1MB of transactions per block.

At the height of the initial craze, users inscribed anything that would fit within a 1MB block, including the original Doom.

More than 21,824 Bitcoin NFTs were created on the network on February 7, 2023. These inscriptions included text, images, video, and audio files. There have been just over 5400 text and image inscriptions to date.

Developers on other proof-of-work blockchains, such as Litecoin and Dogecoin, are trying to copy the Ordinals project, which launched on January 21. Anthony Guerrera, a software engineer, launched the Litecoin Ordinals project on GitHub on February 19. He did this by forking the Bitcoin Ordinals repository on GitHub.

Guerrera explained to Decrypt at the time that Litecoin was chosen because it was the only alternative blockchain with comparable functionality and the same SegWit and Taproot upgrades as Bitcoin.

Even though Ordinal Inscriptions don’t need third parties to be made, developers on Bitcoin sidechain projects like Stacks are using the new interest in Bitcoin NFTs to push Ordinal-compatible wallets and marketplaces that are powered by their token.

Content Source: decrypt.com

Cover Image Source: decrypt.co


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