The total number of BRC-20 tokens exceeded 14,000, and their capitalization totaled more than $1 billion. Meanwhile, the creator of the technology calls his brainchild worthless and urges people not to invest in such tokens.
The hype around BRC-20 tokens, issued by the Bitcoin network via the Ordinals protocol, continues to grow. As of 10:00 a.m. (GMT+3), May 10, their total cap is about $900 million, although the day before it exceeded $1 billion momentarily, before falling to the $700 million area.
Extremely high volatility and general excitement around the Ordinals protocol attracted increased attention to BRC-20 tokens from crypto market participants. It’s worth noting that an anonymous developer under the pseudonym Domo, who developed the BRC-20 standard, calls tokens of this type worthless and urges users not to spend money on them. He also notes the imperfection of the current BRC-20 architecture and reiterates that “this is simply a fun experiment.”
However, the hype prompts representatives of major crypto projects to develop an infrastructure to use digital assets created with the Ordinals protocol:
- BitKeep reps announced plans to fully integrate support for the Ordinals protocol across all of the project’s platforms soon, allowing Bitcoin NFTs and BRC-20 tokens to be displayed, minted, transmitted, and traded;
- representatives of the largest cryptocurrency exchange also announced plans to add support for Ordinals on the Binance NFT platform;
- Bitcoin NFT trading is already available on several smaller NFT marketplaces and some major platforms, such as Magic Eden;
- the ability to store Bitcoin Ordinals in the MetaMask hot wallet also appeared earlier, and the Ledger team notified of adding a similar feature to their hardware crypto wallets;
- Trust Wallet reported that their cryptocurrency wallet doesn’t support Bitcoin NFTs, though they didn’t rule out such integration in the future “should Ordinals become an integral part of the wider Web3 ecosystem.”
The increased interest in the Ordinals protocol and BRC-20 tokens provoked a significant growth of fees on the Bitcoin network the day before, and things remain that way. On May 8, the average commission per transaction on the Bitcoin network exceeded $31, and the total number of transactions in the last few days fluctuated at a record level of 600,000 per day. At the same time, the BTC mempool still expects to process about 400,000 transactions, and the number of issued Bitcoin Ordinals in the last two days exceeds 300,000, the vast majority of which are BRC-20 tokens.
CP Media published a detailed article about the Ordinals protocol and its prospects for Bitcoin.
