Currently, a new record has been set for the number of inscribed Bitcoin Ordinals as a result of the recently launched "token standard" for the blockchain: 58,179 on April 2nd, surpassing the previous record high of 31,692 on March 9th by 83.5%. The recent creation of “Bitcoin Request for Comment” (BRC-20) tokens on the Ordinals protocol in early March, by a pseudonymous on-chain analyst named Domo, is believed to be behind this surge. While Ordinals are a kind of NFT -like "digital artifacts" that carry data in the form of text, JPEG images, PDFs, video, and audio formats on the Bitcoin network, the BRC-20 token standard uses Ordinal Inscriptions to seed token contracts, mint tokens, and transfer tokens – similar to the ERC-20 token standard on Ethereum. The arrival of Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens to Bitcoin was made possible by the Taproot soft fork , which took effect last November 14, 2021.
More than 55,000 inscriptions in the form of text Ordinals appeared on April 2nd, many of which were represented by BRC-20 tokens. The sharp increase last April 2nd 2023 was precisely due to the new tools for interacting with BRC-20 tokens that were introduced. These new tools include Ord.io, UniSat Wallet and BRC-20.io. According to BRC-20.io, 1,600 tokens have been created since the creation of the BRC-20 standard. The most popular BRC-20 tokens include “pepe”, “ordi” and “punk”.
While the market capitalization of BRC-20 tokens is currently less than $10 million, investment firm Galaxy Digital believes that the "Bitcoin NFT" digital asset market could reach up to $4.5 billion by 2025. However, members of the Bitcoin community continue to differ on whether Ordinals are a good fit for the Bitcoin ecosystem . Many crypto enthusiasts welcome Bitcoin NFTs as an innovation that could revitalize the development of Bitcoin and ultimately the entire crypto ecosystem. On the other hand, there are those who dismiss Bitcoin NFTs as spam that only takes up space on the blockchain.
