Majority of Bitcoin Transactions Are Still Ordinals Despite Price Collapse

Ordinals Dominate Bitcoin Network Activity

Despite the recent decline in the price of Bitcoin and claims that the hype around Bitcoin NFTs has died down, ordinal inscriptions continue to dominate activity on the Bitcoin network. On August 21, developer "Leonidas" pointed out that out of the 530,788 transactions on Bitcoin in the past 24 hours, 450,785 of those transactions were ordinals related. This means that ordinals accounted for a staggering 84.9% of the activity on Bitcoin.

Data Confirms Dominance of Ordinals

Data from Dune Analytics and Bitinfocharts supports the trend of ordinals' dominance. Dune Analytics reported that there were more than 400,000 ordinal inscriptions on August 20, while Bitinfocharts reported a daily Bitcoin transaction count of around 556,000. This means that over three-quarters of the current network activity was ordinals related during that time. Industry researcher Eric Wall also noted that 54% of the transactions on the Bitcoin network during the week were ordinals.

Different Picture Than Expected

These recent observations contradict a report from DappRadar on August 17, which claimed that ordinals NFT usage and sales volume had plummeted since its peak in May. However, it is important to note that the report focused on the sales and trading volume of NFTs minted on the Bitcoin network, not the actual inscription activity, which still seems to be high.

Bitcoin ordinals are nonfungible asset artifacts that allow for the inscribing of data onto a Satoshi, the smallest division of a Bitcoin. The protocol was launched in January, and since then, thousands of ordinals have been minted on the Bitcoin network, causing congestion and spikes in transaction fees.