This week, the largest transaction took place for the sale of a unique “inscription” generated using the Ordinals protocol based on Bitcoin. A buyer named OG General paid 10.4 BTC, or about $450,000, for an NFT from a collection called Honey Badger. Such a high price of the asset is due to the fact that it was one of the first created on the basis of Ordinals, when the protocol was still very far from the current hype.

According to CryptoPotato sources, information about the deal was shared by NFT marketplace Magic Eden. This is a popular trading platform that was initially launched on the Solana blockchain, but over time has also been launched on other chains, including Ethereum and Polygon.

The most expensive NFT on the Bitcoin network

The Honey Badger “inscription” series consists of 10 thousand unique NFTs with images of a honey badger in different images.

The user-purchased OG General NFT from the Honey Badger #8 collection was generated on January 15, 2023 at a price of 1 satoshi per byte. In this case, we are talking about the early days of Ordinals – which is why the NFT received such a high price.

The very name of the collection also contains a certain symbolism – sometimes “honey badgers” are those players in the cryptocurrency market who are ready to go headlong towards their goal without regard to the risks.

The author of the deal himself also commented on the purchase on Twitter. He said that Ordinals cannot be stopped – this is just the beginning of popularization of the project.

However, Ordinals also has its share of haters, even among Bitcoin developers. As we have already noted, the activity of the protocol leads to a huge flow of transactions in the network of the main cryptocurrency. For example, today there are almost 200 thousand transactions in the confirmation queue.

This results in higher transfer fees on the Bitcoin network, which can process approximately 6-7 transactions per second. And although this consequence of the problem is beneficial for miners, because they earn much more money from commissions, using cryptocurrency becomes problematic.

However, the prospects for such a ban are questionable. Still, Bitcoin is one of the most decentralized digital assets, which means its users may simply not appreciate such a prospect of direct censorship.

The importance of this event is due to several reasons. Firstly, just a year and a half ago there was no analogue of NFT based on the Bitcoin blockchain, which means the situation shows an incredible pace of popularization of new products in the world of digital assets. Secondly, the current record was one way or another set during a bearish trend, that is, low activity in the market. And this feature allows us to imagine how big the next year could be, taking into account the approval of Bitcoin ETFs in the United States and the improving situation in the economy.