Share this article
Bitcoin Fees Soar Nearly 1,000% Since August as Ordinals Are Back in Vogue
Higher fees are also boosting bottom lines for the industry's beleaguered miners, 21Shares noted.
Updated Nov 8, 2023, 8:21 p.m. Published Nov 8, 2023, 6:10 p.m.
- Network fees on Bitcoin surged to near $7 amid resurgence of Ordinals inscriptions.
- Bitcoin toppled Ethereum in NFT sales volume on Wednesday, per CryptoSlam data.
Bitcoin fees surged to the highest level since the meme coin mania this past May amid the resurgence of Bitcoin-linked non-fungible tokens (NFT), known as Ordinals.
At $6.84 on Wednesday, average transaction fees for using the Bitcoin blockchain are now up roughly 970% from a low of $0.64 touched in August, BitInfoCharts data shows.
STORY CONTINUES BELOW
Don't miss another story.Subscribe to the Crypto Daybook Americas Newsletter today. See all newsletters
The surge is driven by increasing minting of Ordinals, with nearly 1.9 million inscriptions uploaded to the blockchain over the past two weeks, digital asset management firm 21Shares pointed out in a report Wednesday.
Bitcoin became the top blockchain by NFT sales volume (excluding wash trading) in the past 24 hours, toppling Ethereum, CryptoSlam data shows.
Ordinals – a protocol that allows users to store NFTs on Bitcoin – saw a spike in demand this spring during a short-lived meme token craze and drove fees to almost 2-year highs. Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange, listed Ordinals' token ORDI earlier this week and it almost doubled in price before giving up some of its gains Wednesday.
"While ordinals have been limited to memecoin implementations, they do act as a proxy for increasing demand for Bitcoin blockspace," 21Shares analysts said.
Read more: The Ordinals Protocol Has Caused a Resurgence in Bitcoin Development
The resurgence of Ordinals also helps the bottom line of bitcoin miners, the report pointed out, with blockchain transaction fees now making up about 8.5% of their revenue.
This is of particular import for the miners as Bitcoin's quadrennial halving event expected in April 2024 is drawing nearer, which will cut block rewards for the industry in half.
UPDATE (Nov. 8, 19:40 UTC): Adds detail about Bitcoin and Ethereum NFT sales volume data by CryptoSlam.
More For You
What to know:
- As of October 2025, GoPlus has generated $4.7M in total revenue across its product lines. The GoPlus App is the primary revenue driver, contributing $2.5M (approx. 53%), followed by the SafeToken Protocol at $1.7M.
- GoPlus Intelligence's Token Security API averaged 717 million monthly calls year-to-date in 2025 , with a peak of nearly 1 billion calls in February 2025. Total blockchain-level requests, including transaction simulations, averaged an additional 350 million per month.
- Since its January 2025 launch , the $GPS token has registered over $5B in total spot volume and $10B in derivatives volume in 2025. Monthly spot volume peaked in March 2025 at over $1.1B , while derivatives volume peaked the same month at over $4B.
Más para ti
State Street and Galaxy to Launch Tokenized Liquidity Fund on Solana in 2026
The fund will run on Solana at launch and use PYUSD.
Lo que debes saber:
- State Street and Galaxy plan to launch SWEEP in early 2026, using PYUSD for around-the-clock investor flows on Solana.
- Ondo Finance committed about $200 million to seed the tokenized liquidity fund, which will later expand to other chains.
- The firms say the product brings traditional cash-management tools onto public blockchains for qualified institutions.
Top Stories
