Just five days after reaching 50,000 inscriptions, Bitcoiners using the Ordinals protocol have now inscribed more than 100,000 pieces of data onto the Bitcoin blockchain. Since the project’s launch in January 2023, a seemingly endless stream of pictures, audio files and PDFs have been uploaded.
As previously described, inscriptions, through the Ordinals protocol, allow users to embed data, usually images, directly onto the Bitcoin blockchain, effectively enabling NFTs on Bitcoin. A full write-up on the technical ins-and-outs of the protocol can be found here. In addition, Matt Odell has recorded an episode of Citadel Dispatch with the creator of the protocol, Casey Rodarmor, which you can listen to here.
Prominent projects on Ordinals include Bitcoin Shrooms, Astral Babes and Bitcoin Punks, which are Bitcoin-based uploads of the original Ethereum CryptoPunks. One of these has now sold for as much as 9.5 BTC, or approximately $215,000 at the time of writing.
You can explore all of the various inscriptions via the inscriptions explorer. The platform has been rapidly adopted by a wide array of users, from artists to businesses. It has seen an explosion in usage in recent weeks, likely a result of the growing popularity of NFTs and the promise of a NFTs directly built onto the Bitcoin platform, inheriting all of the qualities that make Bitcoin the leading Layer 1 blockchain.