The craze of bitcoin ordinals is bringing additional stress to the mempool. The number of transactions in the waiting room is near a two-year high.
The NFT rage seemed to pick up steam again in March after ordinals accumulated on the bitcoin network in February.
bitcoin ordinals revival
NFT collector Leonidas noted on Twitter that the ordinals have surpassed their previous record. Data cited by Leonidas shows that on March 23, scribes demanded 9.28 BTC in fees.
Similar to non-fungible tokens, simple tokens are digital goods. They can be minted on the satoshi, the smallest unit of bitcoin. Before NFT transactions are validated on the bitcoin blockchain, they are queued up in the mempool’s waiting room. Nodes often confirm transactions with higher fees in the mempool first.
According to the Dune dashboard, the bitcoin ordinals inscription stands at 577,717 as of today. Meanwhile, the total fees for inscriptions exceeded 127 BTC at press time.
So, as a result the mempool is also seeing a spike. As of March 24, the mempool is hovering around 226 MvB in terms of vByte. The last mempool peak of around 250 MvB occurred in April 2021 when bitcoin crossed the $63,000 price point for the first time.
This was before BTC touched a new high of $69,000 in November of the same year. At press time, bitcoin is hovering just above the $28,000 level.
In February, the mempool peaked at around 96 MvB in the last ordinals before returning to normal.
Hash rate and spiking difficulty
Meanwhile, bitcoin mining difficulty increased by 7.5% on Friday to reach an all-time high. At press time, the BTC network is at an ATH hash rate of 400 EH/s with a record difficulty of 46.84 T.
According to data from IntoTheBlock, the on-chain signals were bearish at the time of writing. However, 71% of BTC holders were still making money, and 25% were at a loss at current price levels.
disclaimer
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