- Data shows that fees spent on inscriptions hit a record high of $8.3 million on Dec. 16.
- With almost $5.6M spent on fees, the Avalanche network was the most heavily impacted.
The weekend saw a jump in network transaction fees across all blockchains, as the need for block space was driven by the Ordinals inscriptions frenzy, which isn’t limited to the Bitcoin network.
Gas fees surged over the weekend due to an explosion of Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) chain inscriptions. Dune Analytics data shows that fees spent on inscriptions hit a record high of $8.3 million on Dec. 16.
Inscriptions Frenzy
With almost $5.6 million spent on fees that day alone, the Avalanche network was the most heavily impacted. Aribitrum One spent $2.1 million on fees for inscriptions, putting them in second place. Inscriptions of EVMs accounted for 58% of Avalanche’s network gas costs and 48% of zkSync Era’s gas fees in the last 24 hours.
Inscriptions accounted for 73% of BNB Chain’s transactions in the last 24 hours. The Arbitrum One network had a 78-minute outage on December 15 due to the severity of the issue. Just like Bitcoin’s Ordinals, EVM inscriptions create one-of-a-kind NFTs on the blockchain by encoding information in transaction call data.
At the same time, inscriptions into the Bitcoin network surged over the weekend, driving up transaction costs and the need for block space. According to mempool.space, there are about 280,000 transactions that have not been verified yet.
As a result, Bitcoin transaction costs have risen to as much as $37, according to analysts, making it impossible for many users to utilize the network for its original purpose. As per Bitcoin advocates, Ordinals can’t be stopped and the high fees boost adoption of layer-2 and pushes towards innovation.
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