Glassnode, an on-chain analytics platform, reported on April 25 about the recent surge in Bitcoin ordinal inscription transactions. After a brief decline, the daily inscription transaction count has sharply risen, reaching an all-time high of 193,000 inscriptions minted in a single day on April 23.
Approximately 40% of all Bitcoin transactions were associated with an inscription file on that day. The majority of the inscriptions were text-based, which has grown in popularity due to their smaller data footprint.
Ord.io reported on April 24 that 1.52 million ordinal inscriptions had been made, with 56% of them being text.
However, Dune Analytics reported a total of 1.73 million inscriptions, with more than a million of them being plain text. The total fees for the inscriptions to date were 184 BTC, equivalent to around $5 million.
Bitcoin ordinal inscriptions are similar to non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and can be inscribed into one Satoshi, the smallest denomination of a Bitcoin. The inscribing process writes additional data into the “witness” of the Bitcoin transaction, which was introduced in the SegWit upgrade in 2017. The Bitcoin ordinal inscription craze began in February when users started inscribing their NFTs to satoshis.
On the day of the report, Bitcoin prices climbed 4%, reaching $28,346. This may have been in response to the news that another U.S. bank, First Republic Bank, had lost half of its value following a deposit exodus.