Ordinals: The 2023 Launch That Put 128 Million Files on Bitcoin

At 20:32 UTC on 14 December 2022, a programmer named Casey Rodarmor put a tiny picture into Bitcoin's ledger. It was a pixel-art skull, 793 bytes, smaller than the icon of a phone app, and it cost 322 satoshis in fees, a small fraction of a US cent. Block 767,430 carried it. Outside a few hundred developers, nobody noticed. Five weeks later, on 21 January 2023, Rodarmor told the public that the tool behind it was ready: Ordinals was live on Bitcoin's main network, and anyone running his free software, called ord, could do the same.

By 4 October 2026 the index at ordinals.com counted 127,984,452 inscriptions, files written permanently into the Bitcoin blockchain. Most of them are not art. Tens of millions are short text notes from a token craze that, within four months of launch, made Bitcoin more expensive to use than at any time since 2021, pushed the world's largest crypto exchange to stop bitcoin withdrawals twice in a day, and reopened the angriest argument in Bitcoin's history: what the network is for.

A serial number on every satoshi

Bitcoin, like the pound or the dollar, splits into smaller units. The smallest is the satoshi, named after Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin's anonymous creator. One hundred million satoshis make one bitcoin, so with a coin at about $84,700 a single satoshi is worth less than a tenth of a cent. To the network all satoshis are identical, the way one penny in a bank balance is as good as any other.

Rodarmor's idea, which he called ordinal theory, gives each satoshi a serial number based on the order in which it was mined, like numbering every banknote a mint has ever printed. Once a satoshi can be told apart from the others, it can be collected. The second step was the inscription: attaching a file, such as a picture, a sound clip or a page of text, to one numbered satoshi. Whoever holds that satoshi holds the file.

That makes it an NFT, short for non-fungible token: a one-of-a-kind digital item whose owner is recorded on a blockchain, much like a signed, numbered print that comes with a public deed. NFTs already existed on Ethereum, where the 2021 boom sold cartoon apes for millions of dollars. The difference on Bitcoin was that the picture itself sat inside the blockchain, rather than a web link pointing at a file on some company's server. Rodarmor preferred to call them "digital artifacts".

How a JPEG fits inside a payment ledger

Two earlier upgrades made it possible. SegWit in 2017 and Taproot in November 2021 created a section of each transaction, called the witness, that holds signatures and spending conditions, and charged it at a quarter of the normal rate. A Bitcoin block is capped at four million "weight units": ordinary data costs four units a byte, witness data costs one. Ordinals tucks the file into the witness, dressed up as a block of program code that never runs. That makes images cheap to store and lets a single block approach 4 megabytes.

On 1 February 2023 someone tested the limit. The mining pool Luxor produced block 774,628, at about 3.96 MB the largest block in Bitcoin's history, The Block reported; the previous record was 2.77 MB. Almost all of it was one picture, a 3.9 MB JPEG of a cartoon wizard, inscription number 652, made with Udi Wertheimer, a developer who co-founded the Taproot Wizards project. The block held 63 transactions. A normal block holds thousands.

Punks, apes and the BRC-20 rush

Collectors arrived within weeks. Bitcoin Punks, a copy of Ethereum's CryptoPunks, became the first 10,000-piece collection on Bitcoin in February 2023, and because no Bitcoin marketplace existed yet, early sales were agreed in Discord chats and paid for in ether. On 28 February Yuga Labs, the company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club, announced TwelveFold, 300 generative artworks inscribed on Bitcoin. Its 24-hour auction took 735 bitcoin, about $16.5 million, from 288 winning bidders, Cointelegraph reported. Rodarmor called the bidding process unsafe. Galaxy Digital, the investment firm founded by Mike Novogratz, forecast that Bitcoin NFTs could be a $4.5 billion market by 2025.

Then came the tokens. On 8 March 2023 a pseudonymous on-chain analyst known as domo published BRC-20, a way to create tradable tokens out of nothing but short text inscriptions. A "deploy" note announced a token's name and supply, "mint" notes claimed pieces of it, and "transfer" notes moved them. Bitcoin itself understands none of this. The balances exist only because outside software, called indexers, reads the notes in order and keeps a tally, like a club treasurer keeping accounts in a notebook while the bank sees only cash. The first token, ORDI, had a cap of 21 million, copied from Bitcoin, minted 1,000 at a time.

By May 2023 those notes had turned into a memecoin rush, and every mint was a Bitcoin transaction competing for space. Space in a Bitcoin block works like seats on a train that leaves roughly every ten minutes: there are only so many, and passengers bid for them with fees. The mempool, the waiting room for unconfirmed transactions, swelled to about 395,000 on 7 May, against 56,500 on 26 April, Decrypt reported. That day Binance paused bitcoin withdrawals because its preset fees could not keep up, then paused them again hours later. On 8 May the average Bitcoin fee reached $30.82, the highest since February 2021, according to CryptoQuant; Bitinfocharts put it at about $31. In some blocks, miners earned more from fees than from the 6.25 newly created bitcoin each block then paid.

©CMZ count from the ordinals.com index

Spam, or paying customers

To many Bitcoin users this was vandalism. Bitcoin's case rests on being cheap and hard to censor for anyone moving money, and every full node, the computers around the world that keep a complete copy of the ledger, must store every inscription forever. A cartoon wizard takes the same seat on the train as someone sending rent money home.

The loudest critic was Luke Dashjr, a long-time Bitcoin Core contributor who maintains Bitcoin Knots, an alternative version of the node software, and co-founded the OCEAN mining pool. In December 2023 he wrote that "inscriptions are exploiting a vulnerability in Bitcoin Core to spam the blockchain". Since 2013 Bitcoin Core had let operators limit the extra data in transactions they pass on; inscriptions slipped past that limit by disguising data as code. Knots v25.1 closed the gap, and the US National Vulnerability Database listed the issue as CVE-2023-50428, marked as disputed. Asked whether Ordinals and BRC-20 would stop if the bug were fixed, Dashjr answered "Correct". Bitcoin Core never adopted the change.

The other side had a simple reply: anyone who pays the fee is using Bitcoin as designed, and the miners who secure it needed the money. In December 2023 a second inscription wave pushed fees to 21.75% of all mining rewards, against about 13% in May, and miners' monthly revenue passed $1.5 billion, the most since November 2021. By late December, Dune Analytics data showed close to 50 million inscriptions, about 42.6 million of them BRC-20 notes, and roughly $172 million paid to miners in Ordinals fees during the year. By New Year's Day the ordinals.com index had numbered 52.7 million.

Rodarmor himself had little time for the tokens. He stepped down as lead maintainer of ord in May 2023, handing the job to a pseudonymous developer known as Raph, and in September proposed a tidier token system called Runes, saying fungible tokens were "99.9% scams and memes" that were not going away. Runes went live at block 840,000 on 20 April 2024, the same block as Bitcoin's fourth halving. The pool ViaBTC won it and collected 37.6 bitcoin in fees, about $2.4 million, on top of the 3.125 new coins; the average fee that day hit a record $128.45, The Block reported.

The rush did not last. ORDI peaked at $95.52 in March 2024 and traded near $4.56 in October 2026, down 95%, according to CoinGecko. Magic Eden, the marketplace that once handled most Ordinals trading, shut its Ordinals and Runes market on 9 March 2026. By August 2026 transaction fees made up just 0.69% of miners' revenue, near a ten-year low, according to Glassnode. The 128 million inscriptions remain in the ledger, and will for as long as Bitcoin runs.