Trading of Bitcoin NFTs is Rising Again

As the price of bitcoin rises, bitcoin NFTs are making a quiet comeback, with sales on major Ordinals markets exceeding 19.7 million dollars on Monday. According to data from CryptoSlam, sales yesterday amounted to over 14 million dollars. The figure has jumped since the beginning of the month when daily trading volume was between 5 and 6 million dollars, but it still has a long way to go to reach the data from December, when 85 million dollars were achieved.

The NFT market Magic Eden has once again become the top place for trading bitcoin NFTs, according to data from Dune. Last month, the NFT market announced a new points program for traders, rewarding loyal users with ‘diamonds’.

Bitcoin NFTs could contribute to a fruitful, symbiotic relationship with miners, explained Scott Norris, an independent bitcoin miner at Optiminer.

– Ordinals should help increase transaction fees, which conventional wisdom suggests should help miners – said Norris. The most popular collections on Magic Eden include: NodeMonkes, Bitcoin Puppets, and RSIC Metaprotocol.

The renewed interest in Ordinals comes at a time when the price of bitcoin is sharply rising, reaching levels above 58,000 dollars. Following the hype around the approval of spot bitcoin ETFs last month, the largest blockchain is approaching its long-awaited halving.

The bitcoin halving will mean that miners, who process transactions on the blockchain and produce new bitcoins, will have their reward payouts halved. Miners will have to work harder to process transactions, when they are already working hard to handle Ordinals activity. Ordinals, NFTs inscribed on individual satoshis, bring a different use case to the largest blockchain.

By allowing the inscription of non-financial data such as art, profile pictures, or text into the bitcoin blockchain, they exploded last year and led to the creation of various protocols and projects. However, some members of the bitcoin community condemned this ‘new craze’, criticizing people for using the bitcoin blockchain for speculative NFT activity as it increased transaction costs. At one point, the cost of sending bitcoin was the highest in the last two and a half years, but costs have since fallen as the network became less congested.