The meme token fever is spreading Bitcoinas the market capitalization of tokens built on the leading cryptocurrency's blockchain approached $1 billion on Monday after ORDI, the first of its kind token, was listed on major exchanges.
According brc-20.io, which tracks the nascent market for tokens minted on the Bitcoin blockchain, the market capitalization of all BRC-20 tokens combined totals around $991 million, as of this writing. The market has increased in value, as well as the number of tokens in circulation, in recent days.
Short for "Bitcoin Request for Comment," BRC-20 is an experimental framework for building fungible tokens on Bitcoin using ordinalsthe protocol that allows people to coin NFTs-as assets in Bitcoin called enrollments.
BRC-20 tokens have been around for two months. they were pioneer by the pseudonymous on-chain data enthusiast Domo, who was inspired by the ERC-20 token standard in Ethereal and launched a token called ORDI on March 8.
Since then, Ordi has reached a market capitalization of around $400 million, according to brc-20.io. Other BRC-20 tokens such as PEPE (a different token than the currently hot ethereum meme token of the same name), MEME, PIZA, and DOMO have all followed suit as Bitcoin goes through the kind of meme coin mania that has gripped the broader crypto market in the past with dogecoin, Shiba Inuand BOND.
On Monday, Ordi was listed for trading on crypto.com and gate.io, suggesting that the experimental token is gaining mainstream adoption on cryptocurrency exchanges. At the time of this writing, Ordi's price was $18.50 at gate.ioa notable drop from its peak of $29.58 set earlier in the day.
Still, Ordi's current price represents a sharp increase from its price just a week ago, when Ordi was trading at $3.78 on May 1, according to brc-20.io.
The volatility of BRC-20 tokens highlights the emerging nature of the Ordinals space, as text-based inscriptions, used to create and trade the tokens, take over and image-based inscriptions become less common. Yesterday, more than 399,000 registrations were text-based versus 20 that were image-based, according to data from Dune.
A record number of daily signups of over 400,000 were also recorded yesterday, bringing the total number of signups made to over 4.5 million since the Ordinals protocol took off in late January.
The popularity of BRC-20 tokens is having a noticeable impact on Bitcoin transactions in general. On Sunday, 65% of Bitcoin transactions were related to BRC-20 tokens, according to another Dune paneland leading cryptocurrency exchange Binance briefly stopped Bitcoin withdrawals due to network congestion.
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