Bitcoin bull and Microstrategy co-founder Michael Saylor said the latest Ordinals craze has been a catalyst for Bitcoin adoption

“Every time someone builds an application that’s cool on Bitcoin, like all the Ordinals and inscriptions and whatever that are driving up transaction fees, its a catalyst,” said Saylor on the PBD Podcast.

He roped in bank failures, hyperinflation, regulators calling the asset a commodity, and whenever “a company like Microstrategy buys another $100 million worth of Bitcoin” as similar catalysts for adoption.

Ordinals, unlike the other catalysts mentioned, is a newer development on the leading blockchain.

They offer a way to store media on the network by inscribing their data on the smallest unit of Bitcoin, satoshi. It was developed in early 2023, essentially ushering in non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the largest network in the industry.

The development hasn’t stopped there either.

In March, another programmer created a fungible token creation standard, BRC-20 (a hat tip to Ethereum’s ERC-20 token standard) atop Ordinals, sparking a flurry of meme coins on the market. Yesterday, the market capitalization of BRC-20 tokens hit $1 billion.

Ordinals continue to gain traction too as the world’s leading exchange Binance moved to list Bitcoin NFTs on its platform.

Mining ordinals data.
Bitcoin Ordinals volume by the marketplace. Source: Dune.

While the surge in the network’s demand has increased miner revenues, the high fees have made BTC transfers very expensive.

Bitcoin Ordinals have caused a surge in network fees of around $20 per transaction from less than $2 before May 2023.

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