Trading Vol Breaks New Record

The Bitcoin Ordinals market witnessed a remarkable surge in trading activity, with the volume surpassing $36 million on December 12 and subsequently establishing a new record.

The excitement surrounding SATS increased following the official announcement from Binance regarding the inclusion of BRC-20 Sats (1000SATS). The spot trading pairs for 1000SATS were made accessible earlier this week as part of the listing.

BRC-20 SATS

Bitcoin Ordinals, akin to non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the Bitcoin blockchain, have been a matter of controversy for the most part. After a few weeks of slowdown, Ordinals Inscriptions once again garnered significant interest, with trading volume exploding in mid-November.

Data compiled by Dune Analytics revealed that Bitcoin Ordinals’ trading volume hit an all-time high on December 12th. Notably, crypto exchange OKX played a significant role, contributing 85% to these record-breaking numbers. Additionally, the on-chain transaction volume for SATS exceeded $21 million, marking a new peak in activity.

This comes on the heels of Binance announcing that it would list BRC-20 SATS. The platform opened trading for its spot trading pairs this week while also disclosing plans to eventually add 1000SATS as a new borrowable asset with the new margin pair on Isolated Margin.

SATS – the BRC-20 token, which essentially pays homage to Satoshi Nakamoto – is a relatively new memecoin. Short for Satoshi, SATS is the smallest unit of Bitcoin. As such, one satoshi equals 0.00000001 BTC. The team behind the token is anonymous.

Just hours after the Binance announcement, SATS shot up by more than 120%. It surged to a new all-time high of $0.00000056 before retreating to the press time price of $0.000000476.

According to the on-chain analytics platform Lookonchain, the top 20 holders of SATS now hold 333.3 trillion tokens, amounting to a value of $150.8 million. This represents 15.9% of the overall token supply. Six of these leading holders acquired their SATS through the minting process, amassing approximately 78.57 million SATS, which are currently valued at $35.5 million.

Ordinals: A Vulnerability?

While the emergence of Ordinals sparked a new wave of innovation on Bitcoin, it hasn’t been without major backlash. The widespread excitement surrounding Ordinals NFTs and BRC-20 tokens has resulted in a significant boost to the earnings of BTC miners.

However, prominent BTC developer Luke Dashjr believes Inscriptions are taking advantage of a weakness in Bitcoin Core, causing spam on the blockchain. Bitcoin Core has permitted users to set a threshold for the additional data size in transactions since 2013. Inscriptions, however, circumvent this limit, posing a “vulnerability.”