Ordinals Protocol Results in Massive Hike in Transaction Fees

Ordinals, the recently launched Non-Fungible Token (NFT) protocol on the Bitcoin mainnet, has reportedly been responsible for the precipitous surge in the transaction fees on the blockchain.

Earlier, on January 21, the software developer and the Bitcoin developer Casey Radarmor, officially announced the launch of the protocol on the Bitcoin mainnet in a blog post.

Notably, the Ordinals protocol was invented with the intention to permit the Bitcoin version of NFTs or the “digital artifacts,” including JPEG images, PDFs, video, or audio formats, in the Bitcoin blockchain, with the inscription of satoshis.

As per the Ordinal’s documentation,

Ordinal theory concerns itself with satoshis, giving them individual identities and allowing them to be tracked, transferred, and imbued with meaning.

Significantly, the main focus of the protocol is to add NFTs to the Bitcoin mainnet, as Radarmor described it as a “100% meme-driven development”.

Interestingly, with the launch of the new protocol, users started posting massive files to the Bitcoin network using Ordinals. Such a move involved the great risk of occupying a large block space and thus increasing the transaction charges.

For instance, on February 2, Udi Wertheimer, the independent developer, tweeted that he had the “largest transaction in Bitcoin’s history.” He referred to the transaction he has made using Ordinals to inscribe a large image of 3.94 megabytes, an image of a sunglass-wearing, bald, bearded wizard lauding “magic internet JPEGs.”

Comparetively, the data size of these transactions is much larger than the normal transactions, creating a great difference in the transaction fees. While the typical transactions cost only a few cents or a few dollars, the Ordinals cost ten dollars.

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