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In the development of Bitcoin, a prominent technological innovation is the introduction of ordinals. It can convert a single satoshi into a unique digital artifact capable of carrying rich data. An ordinal is the smallest unit of Bitcoin and can record data such as text or images. Once recorded, each satoshi becomes a unique digital asset.
The Ordinals protocol was first proposed by founder and developer Casey Rodarmor on January 21, 2023. It leverages the Taproot upgrade from 2021, enhancing the capabilities of Bitcoin by expanding the data attachments for each transaction to 4MB. This technological advancement utilizes the existing infrastructure of Bitcoin, opening up new possibilities for embedding richer data on the blockchain, distinguishing itself from traditional digital assets and NFTs.
In February, Yuga Labs announced the first NFT series based on ordinal records. By June, over 11 million ordinals had been inscribed on Bitcoin, with peak volume occurring in May. From July to September, inscription volume continued to increase, with plain text being the most popular type. Looking ahead to the end of 2023, it is predicted that the transaction volume for ordinals will reach approximately $725 million.
With the rise of ordinals, NFT sales have seen a decline from $4.2 billion in September 2021 to $3.8 billion in October 2023, marking an 8.7% decrease. The introduction of ordinals has led to a significant increase in Bitcoin transaction fees and block size, with an astonishing 45.07 million inscriptions on the chain. On November 12, 2023, the number of Bitcoin ordinal inscriptions set a daily all-time record, reaching 505,345. |
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