Bitcoin inscription quantity exceeds 10 million, GBRC721 protocol leads new trend

The total number of inscriptions for the Bitcoin NFT protocol Ordinals has recently surpassed 10 million, with cumulative fee income reaching 1578.4611 BTC, approximately 44.14 million USD. Since software engineer Casey Rodarmor launched the Ordinals protocol on the Bitcoin mainnet on January 30 of this year, the number of inscriptions minted has shown explosive growth. After breaking through 1 million in early April, it achieved a tenfold increase in less than two months, demonstrating an astonishing pace of development and scale expansion.

The surge in the number of inscriptions has directly led to a spike in Bitcoin network fees, which have remained at a high level. At the same time, a large number of creators have flocked to the Ordinals ecosystem, further exacerbating the demand for Bitcoin block space. To address or optimize the current pain points, developers are continuously launching new protocols or standards, among which the GBRC721 protocol is particularly noteworthy.

The full name of the GBRC721 protocol is generative-brc-721, created by Jerry, the initiator of the DogePunks project. This protocol aims to save on-chain resources, achieving a 50%-90% optimization of block space, thereby accommodating more creators and promoting innovation. It addresses the issue of projects having to choose IPFS for off-chain storage, enabling NFTs on the Bitcoin chain to achieve full-chain storage without relying on third-party retrieval support.

The deployment and inscription process of GBRC721 is similar to that of BRC20 tokens, including the creation of BRC721 collections, minting non-fungible serial numbers, and transferring non-fungible Ordinals to standard serial number inscriptions. To optimize the community experience and ensure fair distribution, the developers are considering introducing an on-chain whitelist mechanism.

Currently, the GBRC721 ecosystem has over 10,000 transactions, consuming a total of 1.68 BTC. The most representative project is OrdiBots. As the first case of the GBRC721 standard, OrdiBots is a collection of 1,000 pieces made up of 26 different feature combinations. Through the GBRC721 standard, the size of the entire collection is reduced to 294kb, and the total block space is reduced by about 55%.

OrdiBots completed the inscription in late May, attracting a lot of attention and funding due to its innovation. The total transaction volume has reached 26.8 BTC, with 350 holding addresses. The inscription cost rose from 3 USD to a peak of 0.12 BTC (approximately 3200 USD), an increase of up to 1000 times. The current market value is 77.7 BTC, equivalent to 2.1 million USD.

Another project worth paying attention to is OrdiBlocks, launched by the managers of DogePunks, with a total supply of 666. Influenced by the price increase of OrdiBots, the community has shown great enthusiasm for OrdiBlocks. It quickly rose from a cost price of $3 to $400, and is currently back down to around $90. The total trading volume has reached $60,000, with 223 unique holding addresses.

The GBRC721 protocol has garnered attention due to the impressive surge of OrdiBots, but its ecological infrastructure still needs further improvement. For example, some platforms have not yet supported the actual image display of inscriptions under the GBRC721 standard. Ecological projects also need to continuously build and expand consensus driven by the high enthusiasm of the community to avoid being a flash in the pan.

Looking at the development of the Ordinals protocol, in just four months, the Bitcoin ecosystem has gone from being little known to gaining significant attention, with developers continuously launching new protocols or standards to address existing issues. Although there are still skeptics regarding application development on Bitcoin, the Ordinals protocol has opened new avenues for the current market, bringing new possibilities to the Web3 space.