Bitcoin users have registered over 10 million inscriptions into the Bitcoin blockchain using the newly popular Ordinals protocol. 

The milestone comes shortly after Ordinals founder Casey Rordamor stepped down as the project’s lead maintainer on Saturday.

Ordinals’ Blistering Growth

According to data from Dune Analytics, Bitcoin sports exactly 10,018,046 Ordinals inscriptions at writing time – the vast majority of which were recorded over the past month alone. 

An inscription refers to data embedded into a Bitcoin transaction’s witness data. Inscriptions have always been possible on Bitcoin, but Ordinals allows users to inscribe data into a single identifiable satoshi, opening up a range of potential applications.

When Ordinals inscriptions first gained traction in February, their primary use case was for producing non-fungible tokens (NFTs). This has already turned Bitcoin into the second most popular network for trading NFTs next to Ethereum, according to CryptoSlam. 

However, Ordinals inscriptions ramped up in April as users started leveraging the technology to issue fungible crypto tokens, through the experimental BRC-20 token standard. The standard was highly popular for issuing memecoins at first, but is now used to host the first Bitcoin-based stablecoin Stably USD (USD). 

After its unveiling in early March, BRC-20 triggered an avalanche of new inscriptions beginning in late April, and peaking in early May. The transition in Ordinals’ dominance from NFTs to BRC-20 tokens is visible on the b