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Ordinal Inscriptions, NFT-like digital assets inscribed on the Bitcoin blockchain, have recently seen a massive increase in popularity. This ever-growing interest in Ordinals led to a substantial jump in daily Bitcoin fees, which reached $3.5 million on Wednesday – the highest since May 2021.

What are Ordinals?

The network fee capture on the Bitcoin blockchain spiked to a 2-year high of $3.5 million on Wednesday, according to CryptoFees.info. The Bitcoin fee capture now stands in second place behind Ethereum ($17.23m) after overtaking Uniswap ($2.32m).

The jump likely comes from a recent surge in the popularity of Ordinal Inscriptions NFTs tied to the Bitcoin chain. These NFTs took the Bitcoin chain by storm at the start of the year and continued to see constant growth in recent months, surpassing the 3 million mark earlier this week.

These tokens, also known as Ordinal Inscriptions, refer to digital assets inscribed on a satoshi – the lowest denomination of a Bitcoin (BTC). Similar to NFTs, they allow creators and digital art collectors to establish verifiable ownership and provenance of digital assets, which has been challenging.

Ordinals’ recent rise in popularity follows the launch of the Bitcoin Request for Comment (BRC-20) token standard – a new, experimental standard developed to allow users to issue and transfer NFTs directly on the Bitcoin blockchain. BRC-20 attracted significant interest immediately after its launch, with its combined market cap recently skyrocketing to $137 million – a whopping 682% increase from $17.5 million last week.

Interest in Ordinals Contribute to a New Daily Record in Bitcoin Transactions

When users store and transfer NFTs on the Bitcoin network, they must pay a transaction fee to the network to process their transactions. As the demand for NFTs and other blockchain-based services grows, the number of transactions on the Bitcoin network increases, leading to higher chain fees.

On Wednesday, data from the Dune Analytics dashboard showed that total fees paid for Ordinal inscriptions exceeded 272 BTC, or around $7.6 million. On Monday alone, more than 372,000 inscriptions were created on the Bitcoin chain, leading to a new daily record in Bitcoin transactions of 682,281.

Despite the rapidly-growing interest in Ordinals, Bitcoin’s price fell slightly in the past few days. The world’s biggest cryptocurrency lost its April gains that took its price above the $30,000 threshold, likely due to the latest interest rate hike by the Federal Reserve (Fed) this week.

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