The Bitcoin ecosystem continues to draw user interest recently. Accordingly, BRC-20 tokens gained significant momentum shortly after being introduced to the market in January, with their market value exceeding 4 billion dollars. According to a research report dated December 15 by the cryptocurrency exchange Bitget, the earnings of Bitcoin miners from on-chain fees increased from 1.7% in August to 19.57% in November.
BRC-20 Tokens Gaining Popularity in the Bitcoin Ecosystem
Along with these developments, the daily mining revenue from block rewards surpassed 40 million dollars in November. During this period, Bitcoin has gained 161% in value since the beginning of the year. BRC-20 tokens, introduced to the market in January by Bitcoin developer Casey Rodarmor, continue to rise in popularity as one of the biggest technological advancements in a 15-year blockchain ecosystem.
Bitcoin Ordinals represent a numbering system that allows tracking and transferring by assigning a unique code to each satoshi or one hundred millionth of a Bitcoin. Through the coding process that adds a data layer to each Satoshi, users can create unique crypto assets within the Bitcoin blockchain ecosystem.
The New Challenger to the Ordinals Protocol
The first memecoin created through the BRC-20 standard but not related to the Ordinals protocol, the Ordinals (ORDI) token, currently has a market value of 1.34 billion dollars. With all these developments, researchers have announced that other Bitcoin token standards such as ARC-20 from the Atomicals Protocol also add value to the Bitcoin ecosystem:
“Unlike Ordinals, which relies on third-party sequencers to order asset transactions, the Atomicals protocol’s ARC-20 standard uses Bitcoin’s smallest unit, Satoshi, for the issuance of assets. This step allows Atomicals assets to have a complete transfer history without reliance on any third-party sequencer.”
Currently, the Atomicals Protocol includes ARC-20 tokens and NFT collections, known as realms, which are Bitcoin domain names, and Collection Containers, which store data on the chain. As of December 15, there are a total of 366,879 minting operations in the Atomicals Protocol, with a cumulative cost of 55.8 Bitcoins valued at 2.4 million dollars. The total number of mints in this protocol constitutes 2.69% of the total mint operations found on Ordinals.