Looks like Ordinals and BRC-20 are finally dead

So, I was checking the stats for my OP_RETURN observer and took a look at how things are going with Ordinals inscriptions and BRC-20 transactions. The findings are pretty evident: You see that purple curve on the right side? That's the total combined size of all Ordinals. There’s been a huge drop in Ordinals that we haven’t seen even when Runes launched back in 2024. Here are the numbers: - Back in 2023, at their peak, about 40 MB of Ordinals were being posted daily, with spikes hitting up to 80 MB. Most of that was from BRC-20, which is a pretty inefficient meme token format. - In 2024, when Runes came into play, there was a noticeable drop, with numbers falling to 5-10 MB a day, which still seemed significant. - Then in 2025, with lower fees, Ordinals made a bit of a comeback, hitting 20-30 MB daily, sometimes even over 60 MB. But it looked like none of the tokens really made any profit. - Now in 2026, there's been a shocking and steep decline: in March, it dropped below 20 MB, in April, it went under 8-10 MB and then below 5 MB, since May, it’s been almost flat, adding just 1-3 MB a day. That’s practically nothing. Runes still seem to be doing okay, likely because of those low fees. So it’s strange that Ordinals haven’t taken advantage of the lower costs either. From another query, you can see that the vast majority of transactions are still those small <1 kB ones, which likely means they’re mostly BRC-20. This surprises me, given that BRC-20 is facing a ton of competition now with Runes and various other meme coin platforms, plus the "meme NFT" model just isn't an option anymore.

These inscriptions are useless and they were created to exploit Taproot protocol as well as take advantage of bull run to more easily attract and steal money from greed and inexperienced people. When the bull market went away, money was withdrawn from the market, such useless inscriptions will become no longer attractive and they will die with time. The likely deaths of inscriptions remind me about times when they were very hot. Oridinal theory and the rise of inscriptions. Inscriptions, mempools, and miners.

Few months after the peak of the ordinal hype there were already talks about it being dead due to the sharp decline in volume on the network and also in value of it's coins. It was clear that the idea was to piggyback off the bull run and hope greed pushes enough people into it, such a model by design can only work for a short amount of time. - Jay -

It fumbled because people stop paying attention and probably get bored of it. I can't think of any other reason. There is still occasional deployment of several BRC-20 but they all fumbled. I guess most simply don't care anymore about BRC-20 and prefer to trade shitcoins on another blockchain. Also, BRC-20 seems complex as hell for average people.

Ordinals and all brc-20 are built on top of bitcoin... despite this resilence , like any "crypto" related product, if you don't have a real use, this will just become irrilevant and in some way, die. We have seen a speculation that has lead to some interesting applications, including "ntf" and uncapping "any limit" At least to me, excluding speculation , this It's pretty useless for the real reason we use bitcoin, as a monetary system. Tracking all satoshis as a single unit and creating an artificial difference can be seen as the bad part = blockchain probably has not been designed. This evolution should not become one of the main applications. For sure, decentralized technology could always allow a project to become available, and accessible....

It was all money grabbing opportunity, I knew it back then that it won't end well, I was investing in some altcoins like Render and Kaspa but I never even dare to go into any ordinals projects, some did very well it terms of returns but they died in a very gruesome way, many altcoins did well and stayed stronger than ordinals, that says alot lol. It was an unnecessary experiment that should have never existed in the first place, not gonna lie, I like how every ended for ordinals, as for few comments talking about utility, it doesn't matter, few old them got good utility but people don't care, good utility isn't enough to keep a project alive, if the audience don't want it you are on your own.

Maybe yes. I tried comparing ordinals and brc-20 (also use ordinals protocol) market with runes market on unisat[1-3], with following result. Total 30d volume on top 10 collection. ordinals = 0.13194372 + 0.07518 + 0.0080128 + 0.0043 + 0.0009 + 0.0004 + 0.000388 + 0.000339 + 0.0003 + 0.0002 = 0.22196352BTC brc-20 = 0.10005958 + 0.08677498 + 0.0196 + 0.01516958 + 0.00637 + 0.0038 + 0.003773 + 0.00366433 + 0.002509 + 0.00170905 = 0.24342952BTC runes = 4.23208089 + 0.52831949 + 0.33907812 + 0.10396447 + 0.10385623 + 0.078 + 0.04 + 0.02301371 + 0.02161951 + 0.0191598 = 5.48909222BTC Even if you combine both ordinals and brc-20, it's only 8.5% of runes volume. [1] https://unisat.io/market/collection [2] https://unisat.io/market/brc20 [3] https://unisat.io/runes/market

Runes activity has been going back up in recent months so that may be why Ordinals is seeing a decline. Both protocols were created by the same person. Runestones are supposed to be better than BRC-20 for tokenization on Bitcoin and it would make sense that it would take away market share from BRC-20, thus resulting in fewer Ordinals transactions.

Now we could achieve a stabled and affordable network fee that is not inflated by what ordinals has caused, the apart of what makes it appear as if Bitcoin transaction fee is unaffordable because of their cloggings on the network, competing with the Bitcoin transactions, now that everything has been achieved and restored back to normalcy, you will really hear people shouting of exorbitant transaction fee in Bitcoin.

Yes, that's what I initially thought could have been the reason. But the increase of Runes was already registered before April/May when the BRC-20 weight dropped to unprecedented levels. I have looked at the price evolution of the most popular BRC-20 tokens and honestly I have more questions than answers: This is ORDI measured in BTC (to eliminate Bitcoin price influence) - you see that there was even a price increase in April/May 2026. This is SATS, the #2 at the BRC-20 rankings. Its price is low, but it didn't substantially change after late 2025. No April/May 2026 decline is visible. And still both tokens are firmly in the top #1000 in altcoin rankings. So I'm still wondering if something happened in the Ordinals space. And what's that strange price spike in both tokens just close to the moment the volume drop ocurred? Not that I'm unhappy with it. Some will know that I consider BRC-20 the worst token format ever invented. It was just an amateur experiment with Inscription that went out of control, it could even have fueled the mining bubble in 2023/24. And so I'm surprised the fad lasted so long.

I always thought this ordinals and BRC-20 have nothing to do with Bitcoin project. That's why it don't worked, only for a few that wasn't even care about Bitcoin, just wanted make money, and they was some of the few that made money, and the big miners. Didn't come any benefit for me, it's good news even knowing that a lot of people lose money in this, each one is responsible for their own choices.

Agreed on it being horrible token format. Personally, I was turned off from it almost immediately. I don't have an idea on the Runes increase. Ya got me. I find Runes to be nearly as bad as BRC-20 and, practically, worthless. With regards to that strange price spike you are seeing, I have a speculative answer which matches the timeline: It was likely, in my opinion, related to the adoption of a Bitcoin-native "Digital Matter Theory" asset by F2Pool and SpiderPool as a second-subsidy for their participants. The asset in question is known as DMT-NAT and aims to incentivize miners to a greater degree via, well, more money in their pockets. For what it's worth, Foundry currently has about 8.43T of it, distributed at/via the coinbase level automatically and is there whether they know it or not, valued at about $1M. Though, to be sure, they have not moved any/interacted in the same way as the others (yet). We can see the SpiderPool announcement here and F2Pool announcement here. Additionally, during that same timeframe it was noticed via blockchain transactions that AntPool, Luxor, and ViaBTC had been interacting/playing around with the asset, too; subsequently some Chinese Bitcoiners relayed that they know at least one of the pools mentioned above are actively working to integrate it in their dashboards, as well. Which is *ahem* interesting to me as they are all Chinese mining pools (excluding Luxor) interacting/integrating it, equating to over 60% of the world's hashrate. KuCoin published multiple articles on it around the time, too. Were they officially coming from KuCoin? I'm not sure about that, as one can't tell from the webpage who the author is. Here is one of them.    That's all to say that DMT-NAT during that period of time (couple weeks-ish?) was rising in value at such a rate as to overtake ORDI and SATS for the #1 spot, which it did for a few days before everything cooled off. So, the aforementioned adoption by SpiderPool and F2Pool, the rumors, articles, as well as basic market mechanics, associated (schizophrenic) attention, (perhaps) market manipulation, and even ego resulted in the price spike/s you/we are noticing and seeing. It would be interesting to see all three charted together. By the way, what are you using for your charting?

Various scams will continue to emerge around Bitcoin. Why is this possible? Because Bitcoin is money, and most people do not truly understand what money is or why Bitcoin was created. They keep looking for some other utility beyond its monetary function. Money is not like a car or water. When the average person sees a car, they immediately understand that it is used for transportation. When they see water, they instinctively know that it is meant to be drunk. Money is much harder to understand. To truly understand money, you need to go deep into the rabbit hole, study the Austrian school of economics, and spend hundreds or even thousands of hours learning about it. Most people simply do not have the time, interest, or patience to do that. Scammers understand this weakness and exploit it. That is why we are now seeing an invasion of shitcoins. They sell people stories about a “better bitcoin,” “faster bitcoin,” “more private bitcoun,” or “new” Bitcoin. They sell them stories about NFTs, tokens, and countless other scams. I believe these scams will continue because, as Einstein said, two things are infinite the universe and human stupidity and he was not entirely sure about the universe.

I never cared at all about stupid ordinals or brc-20, but you can't be happy about that when entire Bitcoin network is having less activity. Mempool is always empty and number for transactions is dropping down all the time, now big companies have big supply of coins and they are only using them for speculation and manipulation.

Yeah I remember walking about Bitcoin conference in Miami 2023 and it was everywhere people were saying it was the future and it got so much traction at the start but from the get serious bitcoiners always rejected it and you could tell that they had 0 confidence in ordinals. It just was way too out of the ordinary.  Couldn't resist m8. Anyhow, its nice to see that life is moving in the right direction. Now I just need to get my bitcoin back in check I am down a bit from some needs have arisen. Whats the next big opportunity?:!?

These fake things work based on hype, and if there is enough newbies to be hyped up (aka fooled) to put their hard earned money into them, they get pumped. Otherwise they don't receive any attention since they are useless and start being forgotten (kinda like what happened to ICO tokens). If you check the charts versus price chart you can find some interesting coincidences too. For example the peak in your chart is happening at the same time as one of the largest bitcoin price rises. A 100% rise to go from $15k to $30k in only 4 months, the same months Ordinals Spam is peaking. It is also happening right after 13 months of bear market where price keeps dumping. That reversal into a bull market and the hype it caused (and brought newbies in) helped the Ordinals Attack gain a big momentum.

The problem was not the idea itself. Actual problem was flood of low quality BRC20 spam. which ruined the whole vibe. But there were some positives. Not everything about ordinals was useless. They brought attention and fees to Bitcoin at a time when the network needed it. You know, more users always attract more developer. If you find enough dev in one place they could build more app. And more apps always attract more new users. For one token standard this cycle creates a healthy ecosystem. In this case instead of one ecosystem, liquidity and users are split into several isolated ecosystems. Bitcoin-based meme assets have to compete with numerous alternatives. When you are surviving with lack of any strong use-cases and functionality you cant fragmented like this. Wallet X may support BRC-20 but not Runes. Marketplace Y may only support Ordinals. Exchange Z may only list a handful of these assets. The entire memecoin market is now divided into multiple chains. That is why each market becomes much smaller and liquidity declined.

BRC-20 mostly traded in exchange, the volume still at tens of millions. Even though it's significantly lesser than at its prime but it's still being traded regardless which is a good thing because their users offload transaction to exchange instead which makes sense to see the transaction decreasing on the blockchain lately.

The Ordinals-based shittoken has probably only peripherally to do with the price spike I mentioned. Its price spike occurred at April 21 (see below): Source is Coinpaprika. ORDI and SATS had their price spike during the same time but not exactly the same day as "the unnamed token" I linked above: both on April 17 (on April 21 ORDI already had fallen around 30%). According to Google Gemini the reason for the BRC-20 activity decline could have been instead the closure of the Ordinals section of the Magic Eden marketplace. I could confirm this news (from February/March) here. I had asked Gemini already before I started this thread but it seems it needed the info about the price spike to deliver that result. It looks quite a convincing theory. The reason for the price spike at April 17 instead could have been a simple short squeeze. You're of course correct but I was wondering more about the April 2026 spike at the same time when the activity of BRC-20 declined. Edited the post for "reasons" (thanks @Satofan44, sorry for the merits, wasn't aware of this dishonest shitcoin promotion attempt as I saw this person only once before.).