Bitcoin Miners Capitalizing on Ordinals Hype: Daily Revenue Hit 5-Year High at $17M

For some, the Ordinals craze has wreaked havoc in the Bitcoin ecosystem. BTC’s price may have, so far, failed to capitalize on it, but that was not the case for the network miners.

In fact, the development has been a blessing in disguise for them.

Bitcoin Miner Revenue Shoots Up

This month was marked by skyrocketing transaction fees and network congestion as Bitcoin Ordinals reached unprecedented heights. While Bitcoin’s price is cautiously recovering with modest gains, the network becoming increasingly expensive for transactions is potentially a welcome development for the mining industry, which faced severe battering last year.

In fact, Bitcoin miners earned a total of $17.75 million in revenues on May 8th. According to the data shared by Glassnode CTO Rafael Schultze-Kraft, such a single-day spike in mining revenue is rare.

Happy #bitcoin miners.

$17.7 million USD earned through transactions fees – in a single day.

📊https://t.co/HWoFWtrdkz pic.twitter.com/6Wc4PzDwx7

— Rafael Schultze-Kraft (@n3ocortex) May 9, 2023

Upon gauging further, it was found that the Bitcoin transaction fee for May 8th surged to a whopping $31.14, a level that was last seen in April 2021.

The latest development also coincided with the Ordinals pushing transaction fees above mining rewards for the first time since 2017. As a result, several Bitcoin miners, including Luxor Technologies and AntPool, mined blocks where fees surpassed Bitcoin’s block subsidy of 6.25 BTC.

As Bitcoin Ordinals kept hitting new milestones, a new achievement came in the form of the number of daily inscriptions that more than doubled in a span of nearly ten days only. CryptoPotato recently reported that there are now more than 5.1 million Ordinal inscriptions.

Text-type ordinals had the highest market share after taking over their image counterpart.

The surge in Ordinals transactions naturally increased miner activities and subsequent fees even as the price of the flagship cryptocurrency is yet to mirror the enthusiasm.

Recently, one of the most prominent cryptocurrency exchanges, Binance, also announced plans to list Bitcoin NFTs on its platform.

Michael Saylor’s Take on Ordinals

Not all Bitcoin advocates are happy with the remarkable success that Ordinals had witnessed. However, long-time Bitcoin bull and MicroStrategy co-founder Michael Saylor believes the latest craze could prove to be a catalyst for Bitcoin’s adoption.

In the PBD Podcast, Saylor said the development of an application that’s driving up transaction fees – at the backdrop of bank failures, hyperinflation, and lack of regulatory clarity that’s hurting the asset class – is a catalyst.