Over the past three months, trading volume and the number of sales of Ordinals fell by more than 92% — to $35 million and 172,956 transactions in July. This is according to a report DappRadar.
May 2023 was the peak for Bitcoin-NFT, when the turnover of tokens reached $452 million across 832,648 transactions.
However, with the arrival of summer, the metrics began to decline rapidly. In June, trading volume fell to $106 million. In August, the figure nearly touched the bottom, reaching $3 million by mid-month.
“While fluctuations in sales can be explained by market dynamics, the persistent decline in transaction count may indicate more serious problems. It suggests that fewer traders are interacting with Ordinals. This situation raises concerns about the protocol’s durability and its relevance in the NFT space,” the analysts noted.
DappRadar added that the next few months will be decisive for the ecosystem of the BRC-20 standard.
Researchers believe that although Ordinals brought novelty to the market, tokens on the Polygon and Ethereum networks have established reputations and broader applications. Meanwhile, Bitcoin-NFTs are mostly represented only in the PFP format — images of variously drawn creatures.
“While Ethereum supports a wide range of NFTs, and Polygon enjoys growth in the gaming sector, Bitcoin remains overly focused on the hype of the ‘early days’ of non-fungible tokens,” added DappRadar.
In June in the Ethereum appeared an Ordinals analogue called Ethscriptions. A week after launch, trading volume of assets in the protocol exceeded $1 million.
However, later the project was subjected to a hacker attack. The attacker managed to withdraw 202 assets from 123 addresses.
In July, the Ordinals-platform team Luminex introduced the BRC-69 standard, which simplifies and reduces the cost of issuing NFT collections.
Earlier, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin called the appearance of the Bitcoin inscription protocol a signal of a return to the blockchain’s “creator culture.”