Inscriptions

Daily gas spent on EVM inscriptions surges to record high of $8M

Bitcoin is not the only network getting clogged up with Ordinals inscriptions, with weekend activity on EVM chains also spiking.

Network transaction fees across all blockchains have spiked over the weekend as the Ordinals inscriptions craze continues to push demand for blockspace — and not just on the Bitcoin network.

Inscriptions on Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) chains skyrocketed over the weekend, causing a spike in gas fees.

On Dec. 16, gas spent on inscriptions surged to a record high of $8.3 million, according to data from Dune Analytics.

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Bitcoin Ordinals could be stopped if blockchain bug is patched, claims dev

A Bitcoin Core developer claimed Bitcoin Ordinals exploit a vulnerability allowing inscribers to bypass data size limits, which could soon be fixed.

A bug fix on the Bitcoin network could put a stop to new Bitcoin Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens causing network congestion by “exploiting a vulnerability,” claims a Bitcoin Core developer.

In a Dec. 6 X (formerly Twitter) post, developer Luke Dashjr said inscriptions — used by Ordinals and BRC-20 creators to embed data on satoshi’s — exploit a Bitcoin Core vulnerability to “spam the blockchain.”

He explained the Bitcoin Core code has allowed users to set limits on the size of extra data in transactions since 2013, but “by obfuscating their data as program code, inscriptions bypass this limit.”

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Nifty News: BTC miners cash $5M on Ordinals, Reddit NFTs get botting backlash and more

Bitcoin transaction fees from Ordinals inscriptions have exploded by 240% over the last month.

Bitcoin (BTC) miners have pocketed over $5 million from creating nonfungible tokens (NFT) inscriptions using the Ordinals protocol.

Transaction fees for Ordinals transactions exploded 240% from $1.5 million on March 10 to 5.2 million by April 12, according to Dune Analytics data.

The rise came on the back of a relatively slow period between Feb. 16 and March 10, from $1 million to $1.5 million. Before that, fees hit the $1 million mark within the first four weeks of the Ordinals protocol launching on Jan 21.

Transaction fees paid for Ordinals inscriptions hit the $5 million mark on April 11. Source: Dune Analytics

Nearly 1.1 million Ordinals have been inscribed on the Bitcoin network, mostly comprising JPEG images and text but also consisting of PDFs, video and audio formats.

Roughly 100 to 500 inscriptions are processed in each Bitcoin block, which usually contains between 2,000 and 3,000 transactions. Block 783,758 on April 3 saw a record 3,785 inscriptions, representing nearly 87% of the entire block.

Reddit’s Gen 3 NFTs plagued by botting claims

Online community platform Reddit launched its third batch (Gen 3) of NFTs on April 12 — a “Futures Realities Collection” of collectible avatars created by over 100 artists.

Reddit explained in its announcement that the artists behind each limited edition Avatar will receive royalties upon each sale, and no cryptocurrency was needed to purchase them.

However, the release didn’t come without issues. Many Reddit users claimed they missed out on the sale because spam bots swooped in almost instantly.

Many also believe the bots were the reason behind Reddit’s NFT shop crashing shortly after launch.

“They didn’t incorporate any type of spam or bot prevention, like a simple captcha. Of course the site got overloaded,” one user wrote, with another remarking there was “no way you guys didn’t even think of stopping bots during this drop.“

Twitter user “Pastel Alpha” tweeted they managed to get “a good amount” of the NFTs “even though the site completely died” and thanked its “bot partners” for helping with its haul.

Reddit previously released a batch of Halloween-themed avatars in October 2022, which was followed by super bowl avatars in February.

Adidas releases first in series of dynamic NFTs

Shoe brand Adidas has released the first leg of its latest dynamic NFT collection, “ALTs by Adidas,” the latest move by the company in its quest to expand its NFT ecosystem.

The dynamic NFTs will evolve based on the decisions and engagement of the owner, according to an announcement on April 11, which described the collection as the “first step” toward owning an “ALTS by Adidas” identity.

The floor price of each Adidas NFT is 0.666 Ether (ETH) ($1,275) and has raked in 351 ETH ($672,000) in trading volume so far. There are now 8,989 owners, 56% of them unique.

Related: NFT warranties can help mass adoption of the technology, says Web3 exec

There are 16,000 items in total, and the creators take a 10% cut of each sale.

The ALTS by adidas NFTs are selling for a minimum of around 0.66 ETH. Source: OpenSea

Collectors must buy and burn phases 1 and 2 of Adidas’ “Into the Metaverse” tokens to receive the ALTS by Adidas NFT.

Be nonfungible, my friend: Bruce Lee enters Web3

An NFT collection commemorating the late kung-fu fighter and movie star Bruce “Little Dragon” Lee has been released by the Bruce Lee Estate in partnership with Shibuya, an NFT-driven video platform.

Plans for the release were revealed on April 11 when Lee’s Twitter account, managed by his family, shared an old video clip of Lee, transforming him into an animated version of himself.

The NFTs sold at a starting price of 0.008 ETH ($15), with 13,907 minted in the first 24 hours, totaling over $205,000, according to its smart contract address on Etherscan.

The NFTs were drawn by artist Emily “pplpleasr” Yang and were designed by Shannon Lee — Bruce Lee’s daughter.

Cover album of “House of Lee: Genesis” NFT. Source: Manifold

Despite it being an “open edition” collection, collectors can only mint a maximum of 100 of the NFTs.

Other Nifty News

NFT marketplace OpenSea launched “OpenSea Pro” last week, a new, specialized NFT marketplace aggregator aimed at serving the needs of professional NFT traders. The service was made possible by OpenSea’s acquisition of fellow NFT aggregator Gem in April 2022.

An NFT trader “fat-fingered” a bid for a free NFT, buying it at 100 Ether ($191,000). The token was part of NFT marketplace OpenSea’s Gemesis NFT collection to commemorate the launch of OpenSea Pro on April 4. Some believe the trader meant to bid the token for $100 instead.

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Bitcoin Ordinals community debates fix after inscription validation bug

Currently, over two-thirds of voters on a Twitter poll said the missed inscriptions should be added at a later date instead of there being a retroactive reshuffling.

A few solutions are being discussed to fix a code bug found in the Bitcoin (BTC)-native Ordinals protocol that has prevented over 1,200 inscriptions from being validated.

While nearly every member of the Ordinals community agrees that these inscription requests should be reincluded, the community is debating whether they should be added retroactively or not.

The bug came from the indexer function of the protocol only counting inscriptions that were in the first input of a transaction submitted up to and including version 0.5.1 of the protocol.

One prominent Ordinals member known on Twitter as “Leonidas.og” summarized the pros and cons of each solution in an April 10 tweet, coming a few days after the issue was first made public on April 5 by the GitHub user “veryordinally.”

The first solution involves selecting a block height to retroactively index the so-called “orphan” inscriptions from inscription number 420,285 onwards, which is roughly where the first orphan inscription was identified.

“This feels like the ‘purist’ solution because it means the ordinals protocol would correctly match the logical ordering on-chain,” Leonidas.og explained, despite acknowledging that the reshuffling “may cause other complications.”

The alternative is to not change inscription numbers that have already been validated and to pick a block height to add these orphan inscriptions in at some time in the future, Leonidas.og explained:

“This would not change any existing inscription numbers so the ~1,200 orphans would not be assigned inscription numbers officially in the protocol. It would be up to the market to value them as ‘misprints’ or not.”

Another Ordinals GitHub community member, “Yilak,” argued in favor of not changing up the order because only a fraction of inscription owners have been impacted.

Related: Bitcoin Ordinals daily inscriptions surge due to ‘BRC-20 tokens’

At the time of writing, 67.5% of 1,266 voters are in favor of not changing the inscription numbers, according to a Twitter poll created by Leonidas.og.

On April 8, the number of Bitcoin Ordinals inscriptions surpassed 1 million, according to data from the crypto analytics platform Dune. It came just days after daily new inscriptions hit a record of over 76,300 on April 4.

Ordinals are considered to be digital artifacts on the Bitcoin network, similar to nonfungible tokens. They can compromise of images, PDFs, video or audio formats.

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Bitcoin Ordinals daily inscriptions surge due to ‘BRC-20 tokens’

The BRC-20 token standard utilizes Ordinal inscriptions to deploy token contracts, mint tokens and transfer tokens.

A new daily all-time high has been recorded for the number of Ordinals inscribed on the Bitcoin (BTC) network due to a recently launched “token standard” for the blockchain.

Bitcoin Ordinals reached 58,179 inscriptions on April 2, smashing the previous all-time high of 31,692 on March 9 by 83.5%, according to Dune Analytics data.

The surge is believed to be driven by the recent creation of “Bitcoin Request for Comment” (BRC-20) tokens on the Ordinals protocol by a pseudonymous on-chain analyst named Domo in early March.

Daily count of Ordinals inscriptions shown in green. Source: Dune Analytics

While Ordinals are nonfungible token (NFT)-like “digital artifacts” which carry data in the form of text, JPEG images, PDFs, video and audio formats on the Bitcoin network, the BRC-20 token standard utilizes Ordinal inscriptions to deploy token contracts, mint tokens, and transfer tokens — similar to Ethereum’s ERC-20 token standard.

The arrival of Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens on Bitcoin were enabled by the Taproot soft fork, which took effect on Nov. 14, 2021.

Over 55,000 of the inscriptions on April 2 came in the form of text-based Ordinals, many of which were represented by BRC-20 tokens, according to “Leonidis.og,” the host of an Ordinals-focused podcast.

BRC-20 tokens — which are categorized as text-based Ordinals — are the most commonly inscribed Ordinal on Bitcoin. Source: Dune Analytics.

Leonidis explained in a tweet that the spike on April 2 came on the back of new tools used to interact with BRC-20 tokens launched in the last few days.

“There was a lot of excitement around BRC-20 when it launched a month ago but eventually the hyped died down. During the lull, devs built tools to make interacting with BRC-20 much easier and now we’re seeing ATH interest. I’ve said it before and I will say it again. UX matters!”

Among those new tools include Ord.io, UniSat Wallet and BRC-20.io. According to BRC-20.io, 1,600 tokens have been created since the BRC-20 standard was created.

Among the most popular BRC-20 tokens include “pepe,” “ordi,” and “punk,” currently boasting respective market caps of $2.5 million, $2.1 million and $900,000.

Related: Bitcoin Ordinals creator looks for fix after first instance of shock porn

Over 42,700 BRC–20 tokens have been minted in the last 24 hours, mostly coming from the tokens wzrd, domo, BAYC, meme and pups.

Bitcoin tokens, through the BRC-20 standard, can now be bought and sold on marketplaces, similar to Ethereum ERC-20 tokens. Source: BRC-20.io

While the market cap of BRC-20 tokens currently sits at less than $10 million, digital asset investment firm Galaxy Digital believes the “Bitcoin NFT” market may reach $4.5 billion by 2025.

Members of the Bitcoin community are still split on whether Ordinals is a good fit for the Bitcoin ecosystem. Proponents such as Dan Held suggest it offers more financial use cases on Bitcoin, while others say it’s straying away from Satoshi Nakamoto’s vision of Bitcoin as a peer-to-peer cash system.

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Galaxy tips Bitcoin NFT market to hit $4.5B by 2025

Galaxy’s estimation was based on the rapid uptick of interest in Bitcoin NFTs, currency market infrastructure, and the potential to take some market share away from Ethereum.

In a “base case” scenario, Galaxy Digital’s research unit has tipped the burgeoning Bitcoin nonfungible token (NFT) market to hit a $4.5 billion market cap by March 2025.

Bitcoin NFTs, or Ordinals, have attracted significant attention since the Ordinals protocol launched in late January, enabling users to inscribe data such as images, PDFs, video and audio onto individual satoshis — each representing 0.00000001 Bitcoin (BTC).

NFT giants such as Yuga Labs have even jumped in on the hype. On Feb. 28, the $4 billion firm behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club announced a Bitcoin-based NFT project dubbed “TwelveFold” in a notable recognition of the Ordinals movement.

In a new report published on March 3, Galaxy researchers analyzed the potential growth of Bitcoin NFTs, making estimations “conservatively based on the current size of Ethereum’s NFT market” and its growth rate over the past few years.

“While there are notable differences between inscriptions and NFTs, it’s fair to say that a native on-chain ecosystem for NFTs has emerged on Bitcoin in a way that was never before possible, and its usage has been exploding.”

The report provided three market cap predictions based on the firm’s analysis, covering bear, base and bull case scenarios.

Looking at Galaxy’s baseline analysis, the report outlined that if Bitcoin NFTs can “expand to mainstream NFT culture like PFPs [Profile Pictures], memes and utility projects,” the market capitalization should increase to $4.5 billion.

The researchers also noted that the projection of $4.5 billion is also based on the “rapid development in inscription awareness coupled with the marketplace/wallet infrastructure already out today.”

In a bear case, in which Bitcoin NFTs don’t creep into the mainstream NFT market and pry market share away from Ethereum, Galaxy estimated that Bitcoin NFTs can still reach a market cap of $1.5 billion based on the current level of interest and supporting infrastructure.

Related: Total crypto market cap takes a hit amid Silvergate Bank crisis

On the bullish side of things, Galaxy researchers estimate that the Bitcoin NFT market could reach around $10 billion if it provides strong competition to Ethereum NFTs while providing unique use cases.

Estimated Bitcoin NFT market cap. Source: Galaxy Digital

At the time of the report, more than 250,000 Ordinals have hit the market. Highlighting the significance and utility of Bitcoin NFTs, the researchers noted that:

“The addition of sizeable data storage with strong availability assurances opens up a variety of use cases, many of which are only beginning to be explored, including things like new types of decentralized software or Bitcoin scaling techniques. Even the NFT use case alone, though, has the potential to dramatically widen the scope of Bitcoin’s cultural impact.”


Bitcoin hits record 44M non-zero addresses, thanks to Ordinals: Glassnode

Glassnode noted that this is the first time in Bitcoin history that the network has been used for purposes other than monetary.

The launch of Bitcoin nonfungible tokens (NFTs) — known as Ordinals — has tipped the number of non-zero Bitcoin addresses to a new all-time high of 44 million, according to crypto analytics platform Glassnode.

In a Feb. 13 report from Glassnode, the firm explained that for the first time in Bitcoin’s 14-year history, a portion of network activity is being used for purposes other than peer-to-peer monetary Bitcoin (BTC)  transfers:

“This is a new and unique moment in Bitcoin history, where an innovation is generating network activity without a classical transfer of coin volume for monetary purposes.”

Glassnode explained that the Ordinals surge has contributed to a “short-term uptick in Bitcoin network usage of late” which has brought many “new active users” with a non-zero BTC balance to the network:

Bitcoin addresses with a non-zero balance is surging. Source: Glassnode

“The primary source of this activity is due to Ordinals, which instead of carrying a large payload of coin volume, is instead carrying a larger payload of data and new active users,” said Glassnode.

“This describes a growth in the user base […] from usage beyond the typical investment and monetary transfer use cases,” it added.

A new player competing for block space

Glassnode noted that Ordinals is now competing for block space demand, which is “creating upward pressure on the fee market,” but noted that this hasn’t led to a significant increase in Bitcoin transaction fees. 

According to Glassnode, since Ordinals launched on Jan. 21, the upper range of the mean Bitcoin block size has increased from 1.5-2.0 MB to 3.0-3.5 MB in a matter of weeks.

Mean Bitcoin block sizes over the last three months. Source: Glassnode

However, this hasn’t led to a surge in fees. While there have been some short-lived spikes, Glassnode stated that a “new lower bound transaction fee required for block inclusion” has been reached since Ordinals made their mark on Jan. 21.

Median transaction fees on the Bitcoin network over the last five years. Source: Glassnode

The technological applications behind the Ordinal protocol were enabled by the Taproot soft fork, which took effect in November 2021. Bitcoin Ordinals launched on Jan. 21.

Through the use of the Ordinals numbering scheme, Bitcoin users can assign arbitrary content to satoshis — the smallest denomination of BTC — which enables them to inscribe Bitcoin-native, nonfungible token (NFT)-like images.

There have been over 78,400 NFT-like images and videos inscribed thus far.

The latest Ordinals inscripted onto the Bitcoin network. Source. Ordinals

The impact of the NFT-like images on Bitcoin hasn’t come without controversy though.

Related: Bitcoin is already in its ‘next bull market cycle’ — Pantera Capital

Some notable “Bitcoiners” such as Blockstream CEO Adam Back have recently expressed their dislike for the Ordinals protocol, suggesting that it deviates from Bitcoin’s purpose as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system.

However, others have been more open to the idea. Bitcoin bull Dan Held has asserted on several occasions that Ordinals bring more “financial use cases to Bitcoin.”