The ordinal theory focuses on individual satoshis, the native currency of the Bitcoin network, and allows them to be traced, moved, and given significance. Satoshis, not bitcoin, is the atomic, native currency of the Bitcoin network. One bitcoin can be subdivided into 100,000,000 satoshis, but no further.

The ordinal theory doesn't require any additional tokens or sidechains and can be used with Bitcoin as is. It assigns numismatic value to satoshis, enabling them to be gathered and traded as unique Bitcoin digital artifacts. Satoshis can be marked with arbitrary content to create Bitcoin-native digital artifacts, also known as NFTs, which can be held in Bitcoin wallets and transferred using Bitcoin transactions.

These inscribed satoshis can be moved using Bitcoin transactions, addresses, UTXOs, and transactions. Inscription content follows the web's content model, with a content type and a byte string as its components. Inscription content is saved in taproot script-path spend scripts, which have few restrictions and receive a witness discount, making them cost-effective to store.

Bitcoin blocks are fundamentally limited in size and can only contain a limited number of transactions. Hence, the block size occupied by Ordinal transactions shows the enthusiasm of the bitcoin community over their own version of NFTs in their beloved blockchain. The calculation of blockchain occupation by Ordinals has shown that since February, the share of blocks, transactions, and block size that these NFTs occupied has increased by a considerable amount. While these shares have slightly decreased in recent weeks, they still occupy a substantial amount of blockchain space.

Each transaction has input and output values that are tied to the address conducting the transaction by its signature. The difference between these two values is equal to the fee spent on that particular transaction. Here, the fees spent to inscribe ordinals on a satoshi could be considered as the mint volume (as an indirect equivalent) that an address paid to complete the minting.

There have been a considerable number of dedicated minters who spend a lot of time and resources on inscribing what they want into a satoshi on the Bitcoin network. There are addresses with more than 10k Ordinals or addresses that paid more than 1 BTC on fees. The majority of the minters have only minted one Ordinal with a share of 70% of the total inscriptions. Interestingly, minters with more than 100 Ordinals have inscribed more than 80% of the total Ordinals.

Shout out to @ilemi and @domo whose amazing works were an inspiration for the current analysis.

🚨 The labels for Ordinal collections were selected from Flipside's dim_labels table. There might be some missing inscriptions, since this is still under development.