Miners Earned $600K from Bitcoin's NFT 'Ordinals'
This rise in user engagement has been triggered by the protocol's ability to inscribe data in the form of images and other media types
The rise of Ordinals has been accompanied by a jump in the mean block size of Bitcoin from its typical average of 1.5-2MB to between 3 and 3.5MB in early February
Bitcoin miners have made a whopping $574,000
within just two months from the new and controversial Non-Fungible Token (NFT) protocol, Ordinals.
Ordinals is a blockchain protocol that enables NFTs to be appended in the Bitcoin transaction and is gaining immense popularity in recent times. This rise in its user engagement has been triggered by the protocol's ability to inscribe data in the form of images and other media types.
This data goes into the newly mined blocks on the Bitcoin blockchain, which is otherwise largely used for peer-to-peer monetary transactions. The introduction of this protocol is being referred to as revolutionary as it is giving Bitcoin blockchain network an additional use case. Bitcoin is already the most popular cryptocurrency and Ordinals can push its popularity to another level.
The Ordinals protocol was made possible by the Segregated Witness (SegWit) and Taproot upgrades to the Bitcoin network, which took place in 2017 and 2021 respectively. SegWit increased the block capacity up to 4MB, while Taproot enabled the inscription of data such as images and videos in Bitcoin blocks which has never been the case before.
The rise of Ordinals has been accompanied by a jump in the mean block size of Bitcoin from its typical average of 1.5-2MB to between 3 and 3.5MB in early February. This has been accompanied by an increase in the number of pending SegWit and non-SegWit blocks in the Bitcoin mempool, the highest since the FTX collapse.
The Ordinals protocol has sparked debate over the place for NFTs in the Bitcoin ecosystem, and it is clear that the demand for Bitcoin block space is on the rise. Presently, Bitcoin is far below its all-time high and trying to break through the lasting crypt winter.
With time, the popularity of Bitcoin is surely going to increase and the introduction of NFTs on Bitcoin is going to make it more relevant to present-day blockchain users.
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