Bitcoin Ordinals Are Back, Text Inscriptions the Flavor of the Week

Bitcoin ordinal inscriptions have seen a revival in activity recently. As a result, there has been a peak in the number of inscription transactions.

On April 25, on-chain analytics platform Glassnode reported on the Bitcoin ordinal inscription ecosystem.

It noted that following a brief decline in inscription utilization, the daily inscription transaction count has experienced a sharp resurgence. As a result, it recorded an all-time high of 193,000 Inscriptions minted in a single day on April 23.

Around 40% of all Bitcoin transactions were associated with an inscription file on that day, it noted. The following day saw around 85,000 inscriptions, the third-highest day on record.

Bitcoin Ordinal Text Inscription Revival

Furthermore, the vast majority of the Bitcoin ordinal inscriptions on the record-breaking day were text inscriptions. These continue to dominate transactions, whereas image inscriptions were more popular in the beginning.

Glassnode observed that the proportion of total block size associated with inscriptions has been declining.

“This is due to the increased popularity in Text-based inscriptions, whose data footprint is significantly smaller than their Image counterpart.”

On April 24, Ord.io reported there had been 1.52 million ordinal inscriptions, and 56% of them have been text. Image inscriptions were the second largest share, with around 40%. The remainder were JSON, HTML, PDF, and video files.   

However, Dune Analytics reports a total of 1.73 million total inscriptions, and more than a million of them were plain text. It also revealed that the total fees to date for ordinal inscriptions were 184 BTC, or around $5 million.

Bitcoin ordinal inscriptions are crypto assets similar to nonfungible tokens (NFTs). They can be inscribed into one Satoshi, the smallest denomination of a Bitcoin.

Moreover, the inscribing process writes additional data of the content stored into the “witness” of the Bitcoin transaction. The witness was introduced in the SegWit upgrade in 2017.

SegWit and the Taproot update enabled ordinal users to add 3MB of data to each block from the original constraint of 1MB per block.

The Bitcoin ordinal inscription craze took off in February when users were inscribing their NFTs to satoshis.

Bitcoin Price Up on Banking Bunkum

Bitcoin prices have climbed 4% on the day. As a result, the asset was changing hands for $28,346 at the time of writing, according to BeInCrypto.

The move may have been in response to news that another U.S. bank is in trouble. On April 25, First Republic Bank stock lost half its value following a deposit exodus.