For some, the Ordinals craze has caused chaos in the Bitcoin ecosystem. While BTC’s price has not yet benefited from it, network miners have reaped the rewards, making it a blessing in disguise for them.
Bitcoin Miner Revenue Increases
This month was marked by high transaction fees and network congestion as Bitcoin Ordinals reached unprecedented heights. While Bitcoin’s price is cautiously recovering with modest gains, the increasing cost of transactions on the network is potentially a welcome development for the mining industry, which suffered significant losses last year.
In fact, on May 8th, Bitcoin miners earned a total of $17.75 million in revenue. Such a single-day spike in mining revenue is rare, according to data shared by Glassnode CTO Rafael Schultze-Kraft.
Happy #bitcoin miners.
$17.7 million USD earned through transactions fees – in a single day.
— Rafael Schultze-Kraft (@n3ocortex) May 9, 2023
Upon further examination, it was discovered that the Bitcoin transaction fee for May 8th surged to $31.14, a level last observed in April 2021.
The latest development also coincided with Ordinals pushing transaction fees above mining rewards for the first time since 2017. As a result, several Bitcoin miners, including Luxor Technologies and AntPool, mined blocks where fees surpassed Bitcoin’s block subsidy of 6.25 BTC.
As Bitcoin Ordinals continued to reach new milestones, a new achievement was reached with the number of daily inscriptions doubling in around ten days. CryptoPotato recently reported that there are now more than 5.1 million Ordinal inscriptions. Text-type ordinals now have the highest market share after taking over their image counterpart.
The surge in Ordinals transactions naturally increased miner activities and subsequent fees, even as the price of the flagship cryptocurrency has yet to reflect the enthusiasm. Recently, one of the biggest cryptocurrency exchanges, Binance, also announced plans to list Bitcoin NFTs on its platform.
Michael Saylor’s Perspective on Ordinals
Not all Bitcoin proponents are thrilled with the remarkable success of Ordinals. However, Michael Saylor, a longtime Bitcoin advocate and MicroStrategy co-founder, believes the latest craze could be a catalyst for Bitcoin adoption.
In the PBD Podcast, Saylor stated that the development of an application that’s driving up transaction fees, in the context of bank failures, hyperinflation, and a lack of regulatory clarity that’s harming the asset class, is a catalyst.
