Ordinals surpasses 6k Bitcoins in total fees

The total amount of Ordinals commissions paid exceeded 6,000 Bitcoins (BTC).

According to Dune, the total fees for inscriptions minted using the Bitcoin non-fungible tokens (NFTs) Ordinals protocol exceeded 6,000 BTC, more than $257 million at the current rate.

Additionally, with over 59 million inscriptions, the average fee per serial inscription is 0.0001 BTC, or $4.37.

Bitcoin’s ordinal system allows each Satoshi, or 0.00000001 BTC, to be ordered and uniquely identified. Following the ordinal theory, assigning an identifier to each satoshi is possible depending on when it was mined and in what order it was transferred. This creates the non-fungible property needed to develop NFTs in Bitcoin.

Despite the hype surrounding Ordinals, some remain skeptical about the technology. Thus, in December 2023, the U.S. National Vulnerability Database (NVD) flagged “inscriptions” created in the Ordinals protocol as a cybersecurity threat to the first cryptocurrency network. According to the warning, in some versions of Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Knots, BRC-20 can bypass restrictions on the amount of data transferred through a transaction by disguising it as code.

Even Bitcoin developer Luke Dashjr criticized BRC-20 tokens, which took advantage of a vulnerability in the code to overload the Bitcoin network. According to Dashjr, such tokens clog the blockchain of the first cryptocurrency. Due to this, the network is planning a series of updates that will end BRC-20 and Bitcoin-based NFTs.