Bitcoin’s average block size hit an all-time high of over 2.5MB for the first time since its inception in 2009, thanks to the launch of the Ordinals Non-Fungible Token (NFT) protocol in January 2023.
Block size data from Blockchain.com reflects the jump in bitcoin block size since early February 2023, which increased by more than 2MB in the weeks following the launch of the Ordinals protocol.
As Cryptooshala previously reported, participants in the bitcoin mining ecosystem have already made more than $600,000 processing transactions of ordinals, which have been dubbed non-fungible bitcoin-based tokens.
Bitcoin hits record 44 million non-zero addresses thanks to Ordinals: Glassnode
In January, software engineer Casey Rodarmore launched the Ordinals protocol, which allows the creation of Bitcoin “digital artifacts” on the network. They can consist of JPEG, PDFS images, as well as video and audio files.
As Rodarmor points out in the Ordinals documentation, these digital artifacts can be pegged to a single satoshi that makes up a whole bitcoin. Each BTC is made up of 100,000,000 Satoshi.
“Individual Satoshi can be written into arbitrary content, creating unique digital artifacts native to bitcoin that can be stored in bitcoin wallets and transferred via bitcoin transactions. The tokens are as durable, immutable, secure and decentralized as bitcoin itself.”
The Bitcoin community is divided over the ability to inscribe digital artifacts on the blockchain, with arguments for and against providing much food for thought. One of these main topics of discussion was the increased use of block space to record different sequence numbers.
Bitcoin’s average block size fluctuated between 0.7MB and 1.5MB from July 2021 to February 2023. Since February 5th, Bitcoin’s average block size has surpassed 2MB for the first time and is currently around 2.2MB at the time of writing.
Since the inception of Bitcoin Ordinals, the network has reached a record 44 million non-zero addresses, according to Glassnode. The latest Glassnode newsletter notes that ordinals are competing for block space demand but have not yet had a significant impact on network fees.
Glassnode describes the emergence of ordinals as “a new and unique moment in bitcoin history” where innovation generates network activity without the “classic transfer of coin volume for monetary purposes.”
Credit : cointelegraph.com
