On January 30, “Ordinals,” an NFT protocol created by software engineer Casey Rodarmor, officially launched on the Bitcoin mainnet. The protocol allows users to create Bitcoin versions of NFTs – described on the Bitcoin network as “digital artifacts to support JPEG image, PDF, video or audio format content.” Similar to many NFT items on the Ethereum chain, these “digital artifacts” will be minted on the Bitcoin network.
Recently, Ordinals NFT has been a hot debate among the Bitcoin community. The problem started when Ordinals allowed users to encrypt images and then put the data on the Bitcoin blockchain, essentially turning this into an NFT like on Ethereum. A lot of people tried to encrypt their images, leading to BTC’s block size suddenly being pushed to the limit when it had to contain a large amount of image encoding data.
Crypto derivatives firm BitMEX has identified over 13,000 Ordinals NFTs on the Bitcoin blockchain, evidence that buzz of this NFT is growing fast.
In addition, NFT sold for the highest price to date is 4,178 BTC (equivalent to $96,000).
However, this price record probably won’t take long as the community is competing to buy Ordinals Punks – inspired by CryptoPunks. It’s quite funny that as there is no marketplace for these Bitcoin NFTs, the community is trading them through… Excel sheet.
On the contrary, there are still many people who think Ordinals NFT is spam, attacking the network, and consuming too much block space just to store some jpeg image data. As Rene Pickhardt, a Bitcoin and Lightning Network programmer said:
No wonder Bitcoin maxis are so critical. While accounting for less than 3% of all transactions on the network, Ordinals NFT consumes more than 70% of block capacity.