Ordinals still make up majority of Bitcoin txs despite price collapse

Ordinal inscriptions have continued to dominate activity on the Bitcoin network over the past week despite the cryptocurrency’s recent price decline and suggestions that the hype around Bitcoin NFTs have “died.”

On Aug. 21, Ordinals developer "Leonidas" pointed out that Bitcoin had 530,788 transactions over the past 24 hours, with 450,785 of those transactions being Ordinals related.

“In the midst of everyone claiming "Ordinals are dead" they have literally accounted for 84.9% of the activity on Bitcoin,” he said.

Data from Dune Analytics backs up the trend as it reports that there were more than 400,000 ordinal inscriptions on Aug. 20, while Bitinfocharts reports a daily Bitcoin transaction count of around 556,000.

This means that more than three-quarters of the current network activity was Ordinals related on Aug. 20.

Industry researcher Eric Wall added to that, observing that over the week, 54% of the transactions on the Bitcoin network were Ordinals.

According to Dune, the total number of Ordinal inscriptions is 25.5 million which has generated $53.4 million in fees on the Bitcoin network.

Inscriptions are currently dominated by BRC-20 token minting, with 1.9 million of them minted last week.

Weekly Inscriptions by Type - Dune Analytics

The recent observations paint a different picture to a DappRadar report on Aug. 17 that claimed that Ordinals NFT usage and sales volume had tanked since its peak in May, prompting some crypto observers to declare the hype as having “died down.”

However, the report tracked the sales and trading volume of NFTs minted on the Bitcoin network, not the actual inscription activity which still appears to be high.

Bitcoin Ordinals are nonfungible asset artifacts that enable inscribing data onto a Satoshi, the smallest division of a Bitcoin.

The protocol was launched in January and the following months saw the inscription hype take off as thousands of them were minted on the Bitcoin network causing congestion and spikes in transaction fees which reached a peak in April and May.