Since launching in January of this year, Bitcoin Ordinal NFTs have had a bumpy ride due to the bearish conditions they arrived in.
And per recent reports, the new protocol - which essentially allows us to create Bitcoin-residing NFTs through inscriptions onto satoshis- has hit new lows, with its numbers having crashed over 97% in terms of trade volume and sales count since its peak in May.
The Bitcoin Ordinals Sales Slump
For context, Bitcoin Ordinals’ May peak recorded $452 million in NFT sales from a combined 832,648 individual transactions.
As part of its (ongoing) monumental dip, June then saw Ordinals sales plummet 76.5% to $106 million, which was then followed by an even bigger slump of 66.9% in July (amassing to a measly $35 million worth of sales).
Given that the NFT market hasn’t picked up any momentum since then, August’s figures have looked even grimmer, as only a mere $3 million worth of Bitcoin Ordinals have traded hands thus far. This denotes a further 91.4% drop in sales since July, as well as a 88.1% reduction in individual sales.
On a human level, the number of unique active wallets (UAW) trading Bitcoin Ordinals has fallen 90% since the May peak - that is, from 79,261 UAW to as little as 6,708 in the first half of August. Although showing greater signs of resilience, non-fungible giants Ethereum and Polygon haven’t performed too well across this metric also, as their UAW numbers have slumped 22% and 60% respectively.
With the entire NFT industry feeling the brunt of the crypto winter- even those of the Blue-Chip accord that is- it’ll be interesting to see whether the strangling Bitcoin Ordinals community can make an almighty resurgence.
The distribution of ‘Ordinals By Type’ up until 27/07/23.
Source: https://dune.com/icanhaz/ordinals-bitcoin-nft-inscriptions
For now, however, this seems unlikely, as the text and JPEG nature of the majority of Bitcoin Ordinals doesn’t particularly align with Web’s ‘grand focus’ of ‘utility’- meaning perhaps only a bull market or vast innovation could be its saviour.
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