The number of Bitcoin Ordinals inscriptions on the network has already surpassed the 10 million mark, just a few days after the creator stepped down as the caretaker of the project.
On the 28th of May, Casey Rodarmor announced on social media that he had stepped down as the lead maintainer of the project, where he claimed that he had been unable to give the company the attention that it needed. Casey then handed the role over to Raphjaph, a pseudonymous coder. The Ordinals protocol was launched in January and has rapidly turned out to be one of the most popular ways to mint new assets on the blockchain of Bitcoin. Ordinals initially grew as a way of inscribing the data in the witness portion of Bitcoin transactions, and are coded down onto individual satoshis- which is the smallest divisible unit of the cryptocurrency.
The Rise Of Bitcoin Ordinals Has Been Nothing Short Of Stellar
However, what increased the number of Bitcoin Ordinals inscriptions was the introduction of the BRC-20 token standard in the early part of March. This particularly new token standard, which was brought about by the pseudonymous developer Domo, allowed the users of the token to mint entirely new Bitcoin tokens for the very first time in history. The number of tokens based on Bitcoin then skyrocketed from a few hundred in the first week to around 25,000 at the time of publication, according to data from BRC-20.io.
As it turns out, the rise of Bitcoin Ordinals has also brought in a lot of controversies, with many advocates of Bitcoin critiquing the method of inscribing the assets on the network for being entirely wasteful and inefficient, especially when it came to transaction fees and block space.
