For many people within the crypto industry, there were predictions that the Ordinals would die shortly. The Ordinals is a way of inscribing media into the Bitcoin blockchain via NFTs. Lately, the NFT market has been experiencing some downtime leading to such predictions. But the prediction has been proved wrong as the buzz behind the Ordinals comes back even stronger. Something happened that led to this frenzy.
Someone had figured out how to mint some fungible tokens using the Ordinals protocol. Because of this new finding, the inscription volume of Ordinals has skyrocketed. According to data from the Dune dashboard, Ordinals Inscriptions increased to a new single-day peak of about 31,700.
Why are Ordinal Inscriptions Surging?
Many confirmed reports show that the Ordinal's inscription is surging because of the launch of "BRC-20." It is a method, still in its testing stages, used in minting and transferring tokens via the Bitcoin blockchain.
While this invention irritates those who claim to be Bitcoin maximalists, others see it as a welcomed development that will help drive innovation on the Bitcoin blockchain. Although still in its early and experimental stages, this new tech has been deployed to the Ethereum blockchain in its analog form. A pseudonymous on-chain data enthusiast named Domo was the one who announced he would be launching the implementation of the BRC-20 last Wednesday.
According to Domo, BRC-20 stands for Bitcoin Request for Comment, and it was in collaboration with another pseudonymous user that they launched the BRC-20 implementation.
While speaking to Decrypt via Telegram, Domo said, "I [heard] about the possibility of BRC-20 the past couple of days on Twitter and was curious if I could apply the .sats name format to create it. Basically, what I was trying to do was to see if I could create an off-chain state with the tooling I had at hand (Dune Analytics) and inscriptions."
The Result of this Discovery?
Since BRC-20 was discovered, it has brought in a lot of users who want to use it to create crypto meme tokens. The growth of the BRC-20 is just like that of Bitcoin mining, with many people trying it out.
Within the past 24 hours, more than 23,926 BRC-20 ordinal inscriptions have happened, and more is yet to come. Leonidas.og (@LeonidasNFT), while speaking on Twitter, said, "It only took 6 weeks for people to figure out how to use ordinals to make fungible meme coins. At this point, nothing surprises me."
Since the discovery of Bitcoin Request for Comment (BRC-20), many users have created their own tokens. Domo was the first to create a crypto meme token with the tech, and he named it Domo Ordi. Since the creation of Domo Ordi, there have been subsequent creations of other crypto meme tokens such as Doge, Pepe, and even the word Meme itself.
According to Dune, most inscriptions since the implementation of BRC-20 were mostly text-based. Over 385,000 total inscriptions have been made via Ordinals to date, but a vast majority of them were made just within the past six weeks. Pseudonymous NFT historian Leonidas said text-based inscriptions were more popular because they come in smaller file sizes.
"This fits into a larger trend of text-based inscriptions becoming more popular due to their small file sizes, which can be as low as a few bytes. Because you pay fees proportionate to the file size being inscribed, it costs significantly less in fees to inscribe JSON [code] or text," Leonidas said while speaking to Decrypt.