Bitcoin’s blockchain was flooded with volume over the weekend by transactions involving so-called “BRC-20” Ordinals – an emergent standard for issuing fungible tokens on Bitcoin.  

The surge caused network fees to skyrocket to the point where transaction fee revenue for miners briefly surpassed the natural block subsidy for the first time since 2017. 

Meme Tokens on Bitcoin

According to data from Dune Analytics, over 3.7 million BRC-20 Ordinals transactions have already occurred, versus just 631,630 non-BRC-20 Ordinals transactions. 

A separate dashboard shows that over 4.7 million Ordinals inscriptions are now on Bitcoin, most of which appeared within the past two weeks alone. This indicates that much of the recent activity isn’t so much related to Ordinals NFTs as in early February, but to new fungible assets created by the BRC-20 standard. 

BRC-20 is a “fun experimental standard demonstrating that you can create off-chain balance states with inscriptions,” wrote Twitter author domodata on gitbook, when revealing the innovation on March 10th.  “this is an extremely dynamic experiment, and I strongly discourage any financial decisions to be made on the basis of its design.”

The author added that the idea of issuing assets on Bitcoin is “not novel” and that