Ordinals is a new and controversial Bitcoin-based protocol that is making an impact on-chain with a record number of Taproot-related transactions. Ordinals were designed by Bitcoin Core contributor Casey Rodarmor as a way of identifying individual satoshis on the network, and allow users to store NFT-like content within a satoshi. This has caused a surge in Glassnode’s Taproot adoption and utilization metrics, and Ordinals itself logged its largest number of single day NFT mints on Sunday. However, the technology has been met with opposition from some Bitcoin developers, who view it as a “sheer waste and stupidity of an encoding.” Meanwhile, Bitcoin’s lightning network is also seeing increased activity, with network capacity surging to an all-time high of 5,354 BTC and the number of lightning network nodes rising above 16,000. Lightning Labs is currently building a protocol called Taro with the hope of bringing tokenized assets to Bitcoin’s lightning network.
