Ordinal Inscriptions Approach 19 Million Amid Stagnant Fees, Bitcoin NFT Sales Drop
The number of Bitcoin Ordinal inscriptions on the blockchain is nearing 19 million, a trend that has continued for the past 218 days since December 16, 2022. Statistics indicate that miners have accrued roughly 1,847.66 BTC in fees, worth about $55.29 million, confirming the millions of Ordinal inscriptions.
Bitcoin’s Ordinal Inscriptions Near 19 Million
As of July 22, 2023, at block height 799,830, approximately 18,599,837 Ordinal inscriptions have been issued on the bitcoin blockchain. The trend has continued to rise since the first inscription 218 days ago. Archived statistics from Dune Analytics indicate that 78.5% of all the inscriptions minted on Bitcoin are in plain text form or character sets, while another 13.5% is plain text, bringing the total of plain text and character set inscriptions to 92%. The remainder of the inscriptions consist of images, GIF files, animations, applications, and more.
The number of inscriptions per block has been rising.
The largest number of daily Ordinal inscriptions occurred on May 7, 2023, with 400,091 inscriptions. July 9 saw 385,920, July 16 recorded 385,604 and July 18 saw 323,964 inscriptions. In addition to daily ordinal inscriptions, the number of inscriptions per block has significantly increased in July. A few blocks, including block height 797,976 and block height 798,795, confirmed more than 5,000 inscriptions. While fees from Ordinals experienced their largest increase on May 7 and 8, they have stagnated since then.
The fees accrued by miners for confirming Ordinal inscriptions since December 2022.
Data indicates that people are paying less to confirm approximately the same number of inscriptions as they did in May, despite the continuing drive to inscribe. The higher fees, however, are absent. At block height 799,832 on July 22, there are more than 300,000 unconfirmed transactions on the bitcoin blockchain. While a low-priority transaction will cost 71 cents, a high-priority transaction will cost the sender around $1.88 or 0.000063 BTC. Both financial transactions and Ordinal inscriptions together contribute to the backlog of transactions.
Metrics recorded by cryptoslam.io show that in the past 30 days, $98.85 million in nonfungible token (NFT) sales were recorded. Over the past month, the bitcoin blockchain has the second highest number of sales among 22 different blockchain networks, but sales are more than 13% lower than the previous month. Only two bitcoin-based NFT collections are among the top 10 in terms of 30-day sales. The bitcoin collection, known as Uncategorized Ordinals, was the second largest in terms of the past month’s sales, with $41 million.
