Are non-fungible tokens (NFTs) making a comeback? According to the recent progress of the Ordinals series, the answer might be a resounding “yes.”
Ordinals Are Making Their Marks
NFTs are still relatively new to the crypto space. As pixelated art tokens, they’ve often been sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and by the end of 2020, the space had an overall valuation that stood in the billions. Things looked great for the NFT arena, and many investors thought there was no chance of the industry ever falling through the cracks.
However, in 2022, the crypto space was subjected to several bearish trends that ultimately saw many of the world’s leading assets dip into ugly spaces. Bitcoin, for example, lost more than 70 percent of its value after hitting a new all-time high of about $68,000 per unit in November of 2021, and several additional currencies followed in its footsteps.
This contributed to the crypto space losing more than $2 trillion in valuation, and things are only starting to pick up again. During this time, the NFT industry was subjected to many of the nasty trends the crypto space was suddenly having to contend with, and usage within the space fell by more than 97 percent.
The good news is that there is evidence the NFT arena is once again picking up steam, and Ordinals is proof of that. As NFT-like bitcoin digital artifacts logged on the blockchain, approximately 122,500 individual Ordinals have been minted at the time of writing. The number of inscriptions has jumped by more than 40 percent in just the last few weeks alone, and in early February, numbers peaked to give 21,000 new units life in a single day.
Casey Rodarmor – the creator of Ordinals – commented:
It has really escaped. It’s gone nuclear. There are people building things that I don’t even hear about until they’ve launched, so it’s about where people want to take this… I thought I was building something good, and I thought I was meeting an unmet market demand that NFT collectors had expressed a desire for.
With the success of Ordinals, many industry heads and analysts think the new series could have positive repercussions for bitcoin and the crypto space in general. Alex Adelman – co-founder and CEO of bitcoin rewards program Lolli – mentioned in a recent interview:
If bitcoin wants to stay the most decentralized, widespread, and prolific cryptocurrency, it needs something like [bitcoin NFTs] to push it forward.
Is Crypto Starting to Return to Form?
For the most part, the crypto industry has been enduring a few bullish marks now that 2023 is in play.
Bitcoin, for example, recently hit a six-month high of about $25K per unit, and investors have sudden hope that 2023 could be the year in which the space turns itself around.
