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As Bitcoin’s price rockets, the NFT-like Ordinals are staging a quiet comeback, with sales cross major Ordinals marketplaces crossing $19.7 million on Monday. More than $14 million in sales have taken place today, according to data from CryptoSlam.
The number has shot up since the start of the month, when daily trading volume was between $5-$6 million. But it still has a long way to go to reach what it stood at back in December—$85 million in trades.
And cross-chain marketplace Magic Eden is again the top spot to snap up Ordinals, Dune data shows. Last month, the prominent cross-chain NFT marketplace announced a new points program for traders, gifting “diamonds” to loyal users.
It could be a fruitful, symbiotic relationship, explains Scott Norris, an independent Bitcoin miner at Optiminer.
”Ordinals should help boost the transaction fees, which conventional knowledge would suggest should help miners,” Norris told Decrypt. ”Halving is going to get some of them with power bills, but the bigger ones are generating their own power and selling it back to the grid when needed.”
On Magic Eden, the most popular Ordinals collections include NodeMonkes, Bitcoin Puppets, and RSIC Metaprotocol.
The renewed interest in Ordinals comes as the price of Bitcoin surges—hitting $57,000 per coin today—following hype surrounding spot BTC exchange-traded fund approvals last month, and the biggest crypto network approaches its long-awaited halving event.
Bitcoin’s halving will mean that miners, who process transactions on the blockchain and mint new coins, will have their reward payments cut in half. Miners will have to work harder to process transactions—when they are already working extra hard to process Ordinals activity.
Ordinals—NFT-style inscriptions made onto individual satoshis—bring a different use case to the biggest crypto network.
Allowing for non-financial data such as art, profile pictures, or text to be inscribed onto the Bitcoin blockchain, they blew up last year and have led to all sorts of protocols and projects coming into existence.
Some members of the Bitcoin community have seethed at the new craze, however, blasting people for using the Bitcoin blockchain to mint images because it pushed up the cost of making transactions.
At one point, the cost of sending Bitcoin was the highest it had been in over two and a half years, but the costs have since plunged as the network has become less congested.