Bitcoin Inscriptions: The Latest Digital Craze Taking the Blockchain by Storm
In January, a new digital asset called Ordinals became the talk of the Bitcoin network.
Similar to NFTs, Ordinals are digital assets inscribed on the smallest unit of Bitcoin, called a satoshi, which is made possible by the Taproot upgrade launched in November 2021.
On Monday, the number of Bitcoin Inscriptions surpassed 200,000, with fees skyrocketing to over $170,500 on February 15, 2023.
However, fees have since decreased, with just over $11,000 being paid to miners at the time of writing.
Developers on other blockchains like Litecoin and Dogecoin have attempted to copy the project. Meanwhile, developers on Bitcoin sidechain projects are pushing for Ordinal-compatible wallets and marketplaces.
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Yuga Labs, the Bored Ape Yacht Club creators, announced their very own series of 300 Ordinals.
On February 7, 2023, over 21,824 Bitcoin NFTs were minted on the network; these inscriptions included text, images, video, and audio files. Currently, just over 5,400 text and image inscriptions have taken place.
Alexander Stefanov
Reporter at CoinsPress
Alex is Editor-in-Chief of Coinspress and co-founder of Millennial Media Group, with nearly a decade of experience covering financial markets - crypto first, then everything else. It started in 2016 with Bitcoin. Like most people at the time, he didn't fully understand it - so he kept digging. Blockchain, tokenomics, the projects, the cycles. That curiosity never stopped, and eventually pulled him into traditional markets too: equities, commodities, macro. Not because he left crypto behind, but because you can't properly understand one without the other. What drives him is straightforward: he wants to know why something is happening, not just that it's happening. Most market coverage stops at the headline - price up, price down, here's a chart. Alex finds that kind of reporting actively unhelpful. If you walk away from an article without understanding the mechanism behind the move, what did you actually learn? He holds a degree in Tourism from New Bulgarian University - not the most obvious path into financial markets, but markets have a way of pulling in people who are simply too curious to stay out. He has authored over 200 in-depth analyses and more than 10,000 articles across crypto and traditional finance. He still thinks every day in markets teaches him something new. That's probably why he hasn't stopped.
