Approaching Milestone: Nearly 19 Million Bitcoin Ordinal Inscriptions

As of July 22, 2023, nearly 19 million Ordinal inscriptions are being recorded on the Bitcoin blockchain. This signifies a continuous trend that has been in play for the past 218 days since December 16, 2022. According to statistics, miners have made an approximation of 1,847.66 BTC or around $55.29 million in fees. This fee confirms the millions of Ordinal inscriptions made on the Bitcoin blockchain.

An Overview of Bitcoin’s Ordinal Inscriptions

Having reached a substantial block height of 799,830 on July 22, 2023, the Bitcoin blockchain has around 18,599,837 Ordinal inscriptions. The trend of increasing inscriptions marked its roots from the first one 218 days ago. Data obtained from Dune Analytics archives point out that 78.5% of Bitcoin’s total inscriptions are in plain text form or character sets. Another 13.5% constitute plain text, accumulating to a total of 92% in both plain text and character set inscriptions. The rest is an interesting mix of images, GIF files, animations, applications, and more.

The number of inscriptions per block continues to rise with time and block growth.

Examining the Inscription Statistics

Looking into specific dates, the largest number of Ordinal inscriptions was noted on May 7, 2023 with a staggering count of 400,091 inscriptions. The numbers stayed high with July 9, July 16, and July 18 recording 385,920, 385,604, and 323,964 inscriptions respectively. Apart from the high daily Ordinal inscriptions, July also experienced a significant increase in the number of inscriptions per block. In this regard, blocks at height 797,976 and 798,795 confirmed more than 5,000 inscriptions. However, fee increments due to Ordinals peaked during May 7 and 8 and have since been at a standstill.

The collected fees for confirming Ordinal inscriptions by miners since December 2022.

Inscriptions and Fees: Current Observations

Current data shows that despite the consistent inscription efforts, users are paying less to confirm nearly the same amount of inscriptions as they did in May. The anticipated high fees are now missing from the picture. As of July 22, at block height 799,832, the Bitcoin blockchain has over 300,000 unconfirmed transactions. Hence, while a lower priority transaction may only cost 71 cents, to opt for high priority would cost the sender close to $1.88 or 0.000063 BTC. Meanwhile, both financial transactions and Ordinal inscriptions contribute to the growing pile-up of transactions.

Bitcoin and Nonfungible Tokens (NFTs)

Metrics as per cryptoslam.io reveal that in the past 30 days, nonfungible token (NFT) sales amounted to a total of $98.85 million. In this context, the Bitcoin blockchain holds the second place in terms of sales amongst 22 different blockchain networks. However, the sales are down by more than 13% when compared to the numbers from the previous month.

• In terms of 30-day sales, only two Bitcoin-based NFT collections made it to the top 10.
• The Bitcoin collection, internally known as Uncategorized Ordinals, is the second largest in terms of sales for the past month with a substantial amount of $41 million.