Over the past three months, trading volume and the number of Ordinals fell by more than 92% to $35 million and 172,956 trades in July. A report from DappRadar shows that.
May 2023 was the peak for bitcoin-NFT, at that time token turnover reached $452 million with 832,648 transactions.
However, as the summer progressed, the figures began to decline rapidly. In June, the trading volume fell to $106 million. In August, the value almost approached the bottom, reaching $3 million by the middle of the month.
“While fluctuating sales can be attributed to market dynamics, the steady decline in transactions may indicate a more serious problem. It suggests that fewer traders are interacting with Ordinals. This situation raises concerns about the longevity of the protocol and its relevance in the NFT space,” the analysts said.
DappRadar added that the next few months will be crucial for the BRC-20 standard token ecosystem.
According to the researchers, while Ordinals have brought novelty to the market, tokens on Polygon and Ethereum networks have a proven track record and wider adoption. That said, bitcoin-NFTs are mostly only in PFP format – images with different variations of drawn creatures.
“While Ethereum supports a wide range of NFTs and Polygon is enjoying growth in the gaming sector, bitcoin remains overly fixated on the hype of the ‘early days’ of non-interchangeable tokens,” DappRadar added.
In June, a counterpart to Ordinals called Ethscriptions appeared in the Ethereum ecosystem. A week after its launch, the trading volume of assets in the protocol exceeded $1 million.
However, later the project was subjected to a hacker attack. The attacker managed to withdraw 202 assets from 123 addresses.