The number of inscriptions on the Bitcoin blockchain reached an all-time high on April 2 due to the emergence of BRC-20 tokens on the network. Bitcoin Request for Comment (BRC-20) tokens running on the Ordinals protocol were created in early March by a pseudonymous on-chain analyst named Domo, and enabled by the Taproot soft fork which came into effect in November 2021. These tokens are similar to Ethereum’s ERC-20 token standard as they allow token contracts, token minting and token transfers. The most popular BRC-20 tokens include “pepe,” “ordi” and “punk,” and the total market capitalization of these tokens is currently estimated at less than $10 million.

The spike in Ordinals usage was driven primarily by the new tools developed to support BRC-20 tokens, such as Ord.io, UniSat Wallet, and BRC-20.io. As of April 2 more than 55,000 of the inscription were text-based Ordinals, and more than 42,700 BRC-20 tokens were minted in the last 24 hours, with the majority of these being the tokens “wzrd,” “domo,” “BAYC,” “meme” and “pups.”

Digital asset investment firm Galaxy Digital predicts that the “Bitcoin NFT” market could reach as much as $4.5 billion by 2025. While some members of the Bitcoin community see Ordinals as a positive addition of financial use cases to the network, others see this the development of Ordinals as a deviation from the original concept of Bitcoin being a peer-to-peer cash system.



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