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Germany has 9K Bitcoin left just 3 weeks after it started selling

Germany’s Bitcoin stack briefly dipped below 5,000 BTC after a large amount of funds was sent to Coinbase, Bitstamp and Kraken, but it has since moved some back.

The German government’s Bitcoin wallet is down to 9,094 Bitcoin — just 18% of what it started with — after the latest string of back-and-forth transfers to crypto exchanges on July 11.

The wallet, which has been holding Bitcoin (BTC) seized from a film pirating website crackdown in January, has transferred out billions in Bitcoin since June 19 but ramped up efforts at the start of July.

On July 11, the wallet briefly dipped below 5,000 BTC after sending 10,620 BTC worth around $615 million to cryptocurrency trading platforms Coinbase, Bitstamp, Kraken, Flow Traders and two anonymous addresses, blockchain intelligence firm Arkham noted.

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2021 Bull Run Déjà Vu? Altcoin Market Gains Momentum

Bitcoin fees crash after record daily average of $128 on halving day

The surge in block fees on the halving day was more than making up for the halved block subsidy miners were hit with — but that’s not the case anymore.

The average fees paid on Bitcoin have sharply fallen just a day after reaching a record average of $128 on April 20 — the day of the fourth Bitcoin halving.

As of April 21, Bitcoin (BTC) fees have fallen to an average of $8-10 for medium-priority transactions, according to mempool.space.

Only one day before, Bitcoin clocked $78.3 million in total fees, beating Ethereum by over 24 times according to Crypto Fees.

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2021 Bull Run Déjà Vu? Altcoin Market Gains Momentum

Bitcoin fees top Ethereum for 3 days in a row as halving approaches

Transaction fees will play an important role in keeping Bitcoin miners afloat after the halving as the subsidy for mining a block is set to fall from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC.

Fees on Bitcoin have surpassed Ethereum for three consecutive days as miners and traders prepare for the upcoming Bitcoin halving, and, to a lesser extent, the introduction of Runes on Bitcoin.

Bitcoin miners have cashed in $7.47 million in fees on April 17 — about $160,000 more than the $7.31 million paid to Ethereum stakers, according to Crypto Fees.

Bitcoin miners also raked in $9.98 million and $5.91 million across April 15 and 16 — beating out Ethereum stakers by $3.5 million and 1.1 million on those respective days.

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2021 Bull Run Déjà Vu? Altcoin Market Gains Momentum

Ordinals Market Registers Record Sale: Bitcoin Budgie Changes Hands for Over $1.1 Million in BTC

Ordinals Market Registers Record Sale: Bitcoin Budgie Changes Hands for Over .1 Million in BTCLeonidas, the pseudonymous founder of Ord.io, an ordinals explorer, has reported one of the biggest sales of inscriptions, the so-called Bitcoin native non-fungible tokens (NFTs), to date. Leonidas stated that the second inscription on the Bitcoin blockchain had been sold for 24.48 BTC (over $1.1 million), predicting that more sales will beat this record in […]

2021 Bull Run Déjà Vu? Altcoin Market Gains Momentum

Why a gold rush for inscriptions has broken half a dozen blockchains

Some suggest EVM inscriptions are the latest way for retail to access low-cap coins, while others argue it’s an over-hyped fad. Whatever it is, it’s clogging up the blockchain.

The latest degen “gold rush" to inscribe everything from profile pictures to memecoins has led to at least half a dozen blockchain networks cracking under pressure over the past week.

The last few days have seen Arbirtrum, Avalanche, Cronos, zkSync, and TON all suffering partial or full outages recently due to inscriptions, with modular data availability network Celestia the latest to succumb, according to industry researchers who posted a screenshot of its block explorer on Dec. 18.

Videos have also been posted of mass minting on the Celestia network.

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2021 Bull Run Déjà Vu? Altcoin Market Gains Momentum

Daily gas spent on EVM inscriptions surges to record high of $8M

Bitcoin is not the only network getting clogged up with Ordinals inscriptions, with weekend activity on EVM chains also spiking.

Network transaction fees across all blockchains have spiked over the weekend as the Ordinals inscriptions craze continues to push demand for blockspace — not just on the Bitcoin network.

Inscriptions on Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) chains skyrocketed over the weekend, causing a spike in gas spent on them.

On Dec. 16, gas spent on inscriptions surged to a record high of $8.3 million, according to data from Dune Analytics.

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2021 Bull Run Déjà Vu? Altcoin Market Gains Momentum

Bitcoin Ordinals could be stopped if blockchain bug is patched, claims dev

A Bitcoin Core developer claimed Bitcoin Ordinals exploit a vulnerability allowing inscribers to bypass data size limits, which could soon be fixed.

A bug fix on the Bitcoin network could put a stop to new Bitcoin Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens as they’re causing network congestion by “exploiting a vulnerability,” claims a Bitcoin Core developer.

In a Dec. 6 X (Twitter) post, developer Luke Dashjr said inscriptions — used by Ordinals and BRC-20 creators to embed data on satoshi’s — exploit a Bitcoin Core vulnerability to “spam the blockchain.”

He explained the Bitcoin Core code has allowed users to set limits on the size of extra data in transactions since 2013, but “by obfuscating their data as program code, inscriptions bypass this limit.”

The bug allowing inscriptions to bypass this limit was recently fixed in the latest update to Bitcoin Knots, a Bitcoin Core derivative with less tested or untested features backported from and sometimes maintained outside of the core code.

Another X user asked if Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens “would stop being a thing” if the vulnerability was fixed to which Dashjr replied, “Correct.” Existing inscriptions would still remain.

"Bitcoin Core is still vulnerable in the upcoming  v26 release," he said.

On Dec.

2021 Bull Run Déjà Vu? Altcoin Market Gains Momentum

Bitcoin Ordinals haven’t wrestled blockspace from money TXs: Glassnode

Inscriptions have been acting more as a "packing filler," stuffed into any remaining space once higher-value monetary transfers are packed into blocks, said the firm.

Despite concerns that Bitcoin Ordinals are clogging the network, there is little evidence to suggest inscriptions are taking blockspace away from higher-value Bitcoin (BTC) monetary transfers.

“There is minimal evidence that inscriptions are displacing monetary transfers,” on-chain analytics firm Glassnode explained in a Sept. 25 report.

The firm explained that this is likely because inscription users tend to set low fee rates, expressing willingness to wait longer periods of time for confirmation.

“Inscriptions appear to be buying and consuming the cheapest available blockspace, and are readily displaced by more urgent monetary transfers.”

Bitcoin Ordinals were introduced in Feburary 2023, and have since accounted for the lion’s share of network activity when it comes to daily transaction count.

However, this hasn’t necessarily been reflected in its share of mining fees, with inscriptions only attributing to about 20% of Bitcoin transaction fees, Glassnode noted.

Inscription fee share between images, text, audio, video and other data types on Bitcoin. Source: Glassnode.

More inscriptions means more revenue — but there’s a catch

While inscriptions have strengthened the base-load demand for blockspace and increased fees for miners, Glassnode says Bitcoin’s hashrate has also increased 50% since February.

This has resulted in tougher competition for miners looking to swoop in on revenue fees, says Glassnode:

“With extreme miner competition in play, and the halving event looming, it is likely that miners are on the edge of income stress, with their profitability to be tested unless BTC prices increase in the near term.”

Bitcoin is currently priced at $26,216 but many industry pundits expect some degree of price appreciation in the lead-up to Bitcoin’s halving event scheduled for April 2024.

Related: Bitcoin Ordinals creator Casey Rodarmor pitches BRC-20 alternative ‘Runes’

Currently, most inscriptions come as a result of BRC-20 tokens, which were introduced one month after Casey Rodamor launched the Ordinals protocol on Bitcoin in February.

On Sept. 25, Rodarmor pitched “Runes” as a potential alternative to BRC-20s, suggesting that a UTXO-based fungible token protocol wouldn’t leave as much “junk” unspent transaction outputs on the Bitcoin network.

Magazine: Blockchain games aren’t really decentralized… but that’s about to change

2021 Bull Run Déjà Vu? Altcoin Market Gains Momentum

‘NFTs will win on Bitcoin’ — OnChainMonkey NFT collection ditches Ethereum

Metagood CEO Danny Yang attributed the move to the Bitcoin network being seen as a more secure platform for its users, among other reasons.

The team behind nonfungible token collection OnChainMonkey is shifting its entire collection of 10,000 NFTs from Ethereum to Bitcoin, in a massive undertaking expected to take several months.

"A historical transition is on the horizon as we prepare to migrate our flagship collection, OCM Genesis, from Ethereum to Bitcoin,” Metagood co-founder and CEO Danny Yang said in a statement on Sept. 7.

The OnChainMonkeys were first launched in September 2021 on Ethereum, but Yang said the migration to Bitcoin Ordinals was due to its community seeing Bitcoin as offering a more secure platform for its users.

“The Bitcoin Ordinal protocol is better designed for decentralization and security than the Ethereum NFT protocol. High-value NFTs will win on Bitcoin.”

The proposal to migrate to Bitcoin was passed by 99% of OnChainMonkey tokenholders. Yang said this means the community had a high conviction for moving to Bitcoin.

The migration would come at a hefty cost though, with Metagood expecting to fork out over $1 million to ensure the migration process runs smoothly.

While the migration process is rather complex, each new OnChainMonkey on Bitcoin will have clear provenance to the corresponding original Ethereum NFT. Holders will receive the corresponding Bitcoin Ordinal once they’ve burned the Ethereum NFT.

However, Yang says the migration shouldn’t be too challenging compared to what Metagood has already accomplished in the Bitcoin Ordinals space:

“We were the first to inscribe 10,000 images of a collection on Bitcoin. We were the first to launch a parent-child collection with OCM Dimensions 300. We pioneered recursive inscriptions on Bitcoin, as well as inscribing Three.js and p5.js for everyone to use.”

However, Ethereum continues to dominate the NFT market, settling $236.8 million in NFTs over the last month, compared to second place Solana ($37.7 million), with Bitcoin ($11.1 million) back in sixth place, according to CryptoSlam.

At the same time, Bitcoin Ordinals transaction volumes plunged 98% between May and mid-August despite rising to popularity in early 2023.

But Yang isn’t concerned, highlighting to Cointelegraph that it is only time before a strong Bitcoin-native NFT ecosystem develops. Both Bitcoin and Ethereum NFT ecosystems can thrive, he added.

Related: Ordinals still make up majority of Bitcoin txs despite price collapse

OnChainMonkey NFTs currently trade at an average floor price of 1.10 Ether (ETH) with over 20,550 ETH in transaction volume from 9,500 items since it launched on NFT marketplace OpenSea in September 2021.

Of the 2,900 owners of the OnChainMonkey NFTs, 31% are unique owners, according to OpenSea.

List of OnChainMonkey NFTs currently traded on OpenSea. Source: OpenSea

The arrival of Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens launched in January, which were made possible by the Taproot soft fork executed in November 2021.

Collect this article as an NFT to preserve this moment in history and show your support for independent journalism in the crypto space.

Magazine: Blockchain games aren’t really decentralized… but that’s about to change

2021 Bull Run Déjà Vu? Altcoin Market Gains Momentum

Ordinals still make up majority of Bitcoin txs despite price collapse

Bitcoin Ordinals appear to be alive and kicking with nearly 85% of network activity dominated by inscriptions and BRC-20 minting on Aug. 21.

Ordinal inscriptions have continued to dominate activity on the Bitcoin network over the past week despite the cryptocurrency’s recent price decline and suggestions that the hype around Bitcoin NFTs have “died.”

On Aug. 21, Ordinals developer "Leonidas" pointed out that Bitcoin had 530,788 transactions over the past 24 hours, with 450,785 of those transactions being Ordinals related.

“In the midst of everyone claiming "Ordinals are dead" they have literally accounted for 84.9% of the activity on Bitcoin,” he said.

Data from Dune Analytics backs up the trend as it reports that there were more than 400,000 ordinal inscriptions on Aug. 20, while Bitinfocharts reports a daily Bitcoin transaction count of around 556,000.

This means that more than three-quarters of the current network activity was Ordinals related on Aug. 20.

Industry researcher Eric Wall added to that, observing that over the week, 54% of the transactions on the Bitcoin network were Ordinals.

According to Dune, the total number of Ordinal inscriptions is 25.5 million which has generated $53.4 million in fees on the Bitcoin network.

Inscriptions are currently dominated by BRC-20 token minting, with 1.9 million of them minted last week.

Weekly Inscriptions by Type - Dune Analytics

The recent observations paint a different picture to a DappRadar report on Aug. 17 that claimed that Ordinals NFT usage and sales volume had tanked since its peak in May, prompting some crypto observers to declare the hype as having “died down.”

However, the report tracked the sales and trading volume of NFTs minted on the Bitcoin network, not the actual inscription activity which still appears to be high.

Related: Bitcoin Ordinals rolls out upgrade to rectify 'Cursed Inscriptions' issue

Bitcoin Ordinals are nonfungible asset artifacts that enable inscribing data onto a Satoshi, the smallest division of a Bitcoin.

The protocol was launched in January and the following months saw the inscription hype take off as thousands of them were minted on the Bitcoin network causing congestion and spikes in transaction fees which reached a peak in April and May.

Magazine: Blockchain games aren’t really decentralized… but that’s about to change

2021 Bull Run Déjà Vu? Altcoin Market Gains Momentum