Quick take:
- Despite attracting mixed reactions, Ordinals NFTs are taking the industry by storm.
- The bitcoin-native NFT protocol is registering exponential growth in daily mints, which rose to 14.2k on Thursday.
- Cumulative mints have now risen to more than 35k according to Dune Analytics data.
Ordinals are opening the floodgates for bitcoin NFTs. The bitcoin-native NFT protocol is experiencing an exponential rise in daily mints despite splitting opinions.
After making a relatively slow start to life, Ordinals-based daily mints rose to 1,114 on February 4. Since then, daily mints have risen exponentially to 2,756, 3,540 and 4,599 in three consecutive days. Yesterday, there were more than 8,000 mints on Ordinals. And today, the figure stood at 14.2k as of this writing.
Although bitcoin seems to be lagging behind other blockchains for uniquely identifiable on-chain items, the concept is not new to the ecosystem. As reported by Kraken, Colored Coin protocol and Counterparty exchange were two working concepts that proved bitcoin could track unique items on the blockchain.
Although both products didn’t gain enough legs in the market, more than a decade later, Ordinals seems to be having better success. The success is so significant that it has started to split opinions in the crypto community.
Adam Back is one of those not so keen on the idea. He calls it just “another proof of consumption blockspace thingy.”
And on-chain data expert Data_Always seems to agree after highlighting the rate at which blockspace consumption is rising with every new Ordinals NFT inscription. An inscription refers to the process of putting content on satoshis, the smallest unit in the bitcoin ecosystem equivalent to 1/100,000,000 BTC.
“Spending to inscribe Ordinals is climbing every day. Still only 12% of total fees and 0.3% of the subsidy, but the rise remains exponential. Biggest mempool backlog since FTX and 3AC collapses,” Data_Always wrote on Twitter, comparing the exponential rise to fall of FTX and 3AC.
Although inscribing NFTs on bitcoin seems to be a costly concept, this has not stopped some of the leading NFT projects from launching on bitcoin.
Cryptopunks already inscribed 10,000 NFTs with some being bought for six-digit figures, including one Ordinals Punk that went for 9.5 BTC (~$214,832), while another sold for just under 4.2 BTC, nearly $95,000.
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