More than 13,000 Ordinals NFTs are already minted on the Bitcoin blockchain, signaling that interest in this recently developed type of Bitcoin non-fungible token is rapidly increasing.
Bitmex’s research division released a blog article on Wednesday which revealed that between the initial launch on Dec. 14 and Feb. 7, a total of 13,000 Ordinals had been produced.
In just a few weeks, the sudden increase in JPEGs and other media files on Bitcoin has taken up 526 megabytes of block space, costing the minters 6.77 bitcoin (the equivalent of about $155,000 at the time of writing this), as stated in the report.
If we plot the total number of Ordinals transactions to date in a graph, we can see the growth is shaped like a “hockey stick”, indicating that NFT activity on Bitcoin has skyrocketed.
Rene Pickhardt, a highly respected Bitcoiner, has expressed his displeasure with the growing interest in Ordinals, accusing the Ordinals crowd of bombarding the most important blockchain with massive JPEGs, which he called “spamming”.
According to data provided by critics such as Pickhardt, the proportion of Bitcoin transactions generated by Ordinals was just above 3% on Wednesday, despite them consuming nearly 70% of the Bitcoin block space.
Post Ordinals, the Bitcoin Network has recently seen an upsurge of activity, with the highest transaction fees in over a year and a sharp increase in the number of transactions.
The Taproot upgrade, launched in November 2021, was designed to enhance the platform‘s privacy and performance, enabling developers to create native applications and store text/images in transaction data.
How Ordinals enables users to securely store JPEGs on the blockchain, which emphasizes why it is a more advanced platform than Ethereum NFTs. It also eliminates the need for centralized storage, like IPFS, making Ordinals an incredibly secure system.
I have written a complete post on Bitcoin NFT Ordinals. Give it a read, if you want to learn more.
