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The price of ORDI, by far the most valuable token minted using the Bitcoin BRC-20 standard, touched a new all-time high Friday as it inches nearer and nearer to the top 50 cryptocurrencies by market cap.
The biggest BRC-2o asset hit a new peak price of $81.96, according to CoinGecko. It has since experienced a sell-off and has dropped by over 11%. It is now trading for $73.92, a 6% jump over the past 24 hours, and sits as the 56th largest cryptocurrency via market cap.
Over the week, though, it is one of the best-performing cryptocurrencies with a total seven-day spike of 45%. Its price action reflects the interest investors still have in Ordinals—NFT-style inscriptions on the Bitcoin network.
The assets were one of the hottest crypto crazes of this year as investors snapped up images and text stored on the digital asset industry's oldest and largest blockchain. The Ordinals protocol was adapted to power fungible tokens via the BRC-20 standard, enabling a wave of tokens including meme coins.
ORDI was the first one minted. And with a market cap of $1.55 billion plus listing on major crypto exchanges, it is by far the biggest token on Bitcoin.
What's the point of ORDI? Demand is largely speculative right now, but the asset also shows how Bitcoin's network can be used for minting digital tokens—just like many other major blockchains.
But with the Ordinals and BRC-20 craze come downsides: Bitcoin transaction fees have shot up again over the past few days.
Right now, the average cost to send Bitcoin stands at $24.10, according to Bitinfocharts data. This is because with more people using the Bitcoin blockchain to make transactions related to Ordinals, the network becomes clogged and therefore more costly.
Earlier this month, the average cost to send Bitcoin reached its highest in over two and a half years, at $37.58. This has led some in the Bitcoin community to claim that Ordinals are "spam" and stop people who could benefit from using Bitcoin to send cash from doing so.
Bitcoin itself is down slightly on the day, falling about 1% to a current price of $41,985.
Edited by Andrew Hayward