Number of Bitcoin NFTs from Ordinals tops 10 million

The number of NFTs on the Bitcoin blockchain released thanks to the Ordinals protocol, has reached 10,141,434. More than 80% of them are related to BRC-20.

The number of Bitcoin Ordinals Inscriptions minted has exceeded 10 million, of which more than 80% are related to BRC-20; a total of 1578.46 BTC fees have been paid, which is about 44 million US dollars. The current daily minting of Ordinals Inscriptions is about 200k.…

— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) May 30, 2023

Daily issuance pace of Ordinals in May ranged from 144,000 to 400,000.

Miners earned 1,593.18 BTC (~$44.3m) from issuing such assets.

The share of revenue from fees in their income reached the highest level since April 2021, at 14.3%, according to The Block.

On May 29, the ongoing hype around Ordinals and BRC-20 led to a new monthly transactions record in the network (24.8 million).

The appearance of Ordinals in late January 2023 was made possible by the Taproot soft fork. The project uses satoshi numbering (serialization) to record data in the Taproot‘s witness portion of a Bitcoin transaction. The overwhelming majority of ‘digital artifacts’ (91.1%) have been created in text form.

In May, Digital Bitcoin Art and Assets (DIBA) launched a beta version of the ‘first marketplace for Bitcoin-NFT‘ based on RGB smart contracts RGB.

Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dash Jr. proposed applying a ‘spam filter’ for tokens of the BRC-20 and Ordinals standards due to their negative impact on the blockchain. According to him, such an approach would help ‘weed out’ transactions linked to them, which Dash described as ‘junk’.