Daily Ordinals Inscriptions Approach All-Time High as Bitcoin Fees Remain Low

Bitcoin Ordinals continue their relentless takeover of the network–nearing the all-time high for daily inscriptions, whilst maintaining low fees. 

There was an impressive surge in activity over the weekend, according to crypto data provider Dune, with Sunday clocking the second-busiest day in Ordinal history, registering 385,920 inscriptions. The number is slightly below the number one placeholder, May 7 (also a weekend), which saw over 400,000 inscriptions. 

Even so, Bitcoin transaction fees have remained low after their May highs, according to Dune’s Ordinal dashboard. Sunday, which saw the spike in inscription activity, only notched 2.5 BTC in fees.

Indeed, given the parabolic rise in inscriptions—which currently number 16,299,730—and the social madness that ensued, fees have actually been consistently low over the past weeks. Users haven’t paid more than 3 BTC a day during the month of July, and the network hasn’t seen a daily fee count surpass 10 Bitcoin since May 31. 

That is a significant difference from the previous occasion in which the network neared or reached 400,000 inscriptions. In early May, a fierce debate was triggered after a bloated Bitcoin network was charging triple-digit fees for transactions. Users on May 7 paid 247 Bitcoin in fees—marking a stunning 10,000% difference from this weekend.

As for types of inscriptions, the most popular is text-based content, as per data from Dune, registering over 13 million inscriptions, a colossal 81.3% of the total inscribed to date.

This near all-time high could be the result of a seemingly unstoppable number of Ordinal-related projects that are popping up and the popularity they have garnered.

In late June, Bitmaps—a protocol that offers a way for users to claim ownership over individual blocks—launched and subsequently climbed to the top of daily inscription counts, totaling 817,131, and held that spot for 19 days straight. 

Last week a new Ordinals standard, BRC-69, introduced “recursive inscriptions,” a way to recycle data from already existing inscriptions, reducing costs by more than 90% and allowing users to bypass the 4-megabyte block limit. 

Alongside BRC-69, last Friday news broke that Ordinals-based BRC-20 tokens were now expanding to Ethereum, with popular ORDI and OXBT tokens being bridged and creating the BRC-20 Curated Collection on the dominant NFT ecosystem. 

Even Ethereum inventor Vitalik Buterin has praised the arrival of Ordinals, saying he “definitely sees signs of hope now that we have Ordinals,” in a Twitter Spaces last week, where he added that they have brought “a return to builder culture."