Meme coins are on the rise in unfamiliar places thanks to Ordinals, the project launched in January on the Bitcoin network. It started with an NFT-like effort to "inscribe" assets like artwork and profile pictures onto Bitcoin’s blockchain, but soon evolved to support BRC-20 tokens minted using the same protocol.
Now, thanks to the sensation surrounding Ordinal inscriptions and meme tokens on Bitcoin—not to mention the increasingly high network fees that resulted—inscribers have brought the latest craze in blockchain to Litecoin and Dogecoin. And in the process, they’ve sent daily transaction totals to the moon.
On Wednesday, the three largest proof-of-work blockchains by market capitalization collectively tallied over 2 million daily transactions: 579,260 on Bitcoin, 363,885 on Litecoin, and 1.126 million on Dogecoin alone, per data from BitInfoCharts. Each chain has also marked a respective all-time single-day peak for transactions so far in May.
How did we get here? Ordinals coming to Litecoin and Dogecoin was a natural progression, considering that Litecoin is a fork of Bitcoin and Dogecoin was based on code forked from Litecoin. They're all related, in a sense, and that's what has led to the migration of Ordinals tech from Bitcoin to the others.
Meanwhile, the BRC-20 and subsequent LTC-20 and DRC-20 standards were inspired by Ethereum’s ERC-20 tokens, allowing developers to create “fungible tokens” on the blockchains. It was a lighthearted experiment on Bitcoin... until the tokens caught on and nearly reached a collective $1 billion mar
ket cap.
