Bitcoin Inscriptions See Resurgence, Occupy 40% Of Transfers

On-chain data shows the Bitcoin Inscriptions have made a comeback after seeing decline earlier, now hitting a new all-time high transaction count.

Bitcoin Inscriptions Transaction Count Share Has Hit A New ATH Of 40%

According to data from the on-chain analytics firm Glassnode, a peak of about 193,000 Inscriptions were recorded inside a single day recently. “Inscriptions” here refer to an application of the Bitcoin network that are similar to “non-fungible tokens” (NFTs) used on other blockchains.

There is one major difference between the Inscriptions and the NFTs on other networks like Ethereum, however, and it’s that the Inscriptions are directly inscribed into the blockchain (which is what has earned them the name).

Them being directly stored into the chain like this has implications for the Bitcoin block size and the overall size of the blockchain, which an earlier report from Glassnode already discussed.

Since their emergence, the inscriptions have mostly enjoyed an increasing amount of popularity, but earlier this month, they faced some decline. In recent days, however, this BTC application has observed a resurgence.

The below chart shows how the number of new Inscriptions being minted daily has changed since their inception.

The value of the metric seems to have been quite high in recent days | Source: Glassnode on Twitter

As displayed in the graph, the Inscription transactions recorded their all-time high count just recently, as the network observed 193,000 Inscriptions being minted in a single day.

The chart also breaks down how many of these transactions taking place on the network involve which type of Inscriptions. There are five main categories here: image, text, audio, video, and other.

While image Inscriptions were the most popular type in the early days of the technology, the text-based ones seem to have dominated the Bitcoin blockchain recently. The other categories look to have seen very few mints compared to these two.

As a percentage of the total transactions (of any type) taking place on the BTC network, the Inscriptions occupied 40% share during their latest surge of utilization.

Looks like the value of the metric has been elevated recently | Source: Glassnode on Twitter

Interestingly, while the Inscriptions may have made a comeback recently, the block size share occupied by them has only continued to go down, as the chart highlights.

Decreasing block size share of the transactions associated with Inscriptions | Source: Glassnode on Twitter

The reason behind this trend lies in the fact that text-based Inscriptions have been gaining steam lately, which are naturally significantly more lightweight in terms of data size compared to other types like image or video.

From the below chart, it’s apparent that the text Inscriptions currently on the chain have a negligible mean size (nearly 0 kB), while the image type has a mean size of about 13 kB.

The audio type has the largest mean size at around 115 kB | Source: Glassnode on Twitter

BTC Price

At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading around $27,700, down 8% in the last week.

BTC has seen significant decline in the last few days | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView

Featured image from Jievani Weerasinghe on Unsplash.com, charts from TradingView.com, Glassnode.com