According to experts at analytics firm Glassnode, the Ordinals phenomenon, the protocol for creating the first NFTs on the Bitcoin blockchain, has created a greater load on the network.
The emergence of Ordinals in late January was made possible by the Taproot hard fork. The project uses satoshi numbering (serialization) to write data to the "token" part of a Bitcoin transaction.
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The popularity of the innovation led to an expansion in the use of Taproot signatures.
The average block size also increased from a stable 1.5 to 2 MB to 3 to 3.5 MB. Arbitrary data in the form of images can take up space up to a size limit of 4 MB.
BTC supporters consider the NFTs project as an "attack on the network." Anticipating a new trend, supported by the decentralization of BTC, users started to massively load the blockchain with copies of Ethereum projects such as CryptoPunks and pixelated Rocks, audio files and other objects.