The inscriptions craze may not be all bad for blockchain networks, especially those that can scale to handle the spikes in throughput.
An ongoing craze to mint inscriptions on non-Bitcoin-base chains has seen several blockchain networks, including Arbitrum and BNB Chain, hitting all-time highs in throughput.
According to data from the pseudonymous analyst “hildobby,” a data researcher at crypto venture fund Dragonfly, Goerli, zkSync, Arbitrum, Gnosis and the BNB Chain all hit daily peak transactions per second (TPS) in December.
Between 83% and 97% of the transactions on those five chains have been inscriptions. Additionally, Fantom, Celo, Avalanche and Polygon hit new daily TPS records in November, according to the data.
Optimism hit hourly TPS records of 87,960 on Dec. 19, and Avalanche hit an hourly TPS record of 289,285 on Dec. 18, a Dune Analytics dashboard created by the analyst found.
Looking back over the past two years, transaction counts on leading blockchains have also spiked to new highs during the recent inscription craze.
The amount spent on gas for minting new inscriptions has also surged to new all-time highs.
Like Bitcoin Ordinals, users have found they can make inscriptions using transaction call data on Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-based chains. They can mint anything from a memecoin to a social media profile picture, which has inevitably increased demand for block space.
On Dec. 19, Ava Labs co-founder Kevin Sekniqi noted that the Avalanche C-Chain (contract chain) hit 977 TPS “and many EVM chains just broke.”
He added that inscriptions have been “a great stress test” of current infrastructure, emphasizing the need for subnets to handle the additional loads.
As reported by Cointelegraph on Dec. 19, the inscriptions gold rush also caused full and partial outages on several networks recently, including Arbitrum, zkSync, Cronos and Celestia.
Leave feedback about this