The Ordinals craze appears to be as hot as ever, with numerous new versions popping up on different blockchains. The most recent addition is Ordinals on the TON blockchain, called TON20, which has caused significant congestion on the network.
Recently, the TON blockchain experienced severe congestion due to a sudden surge in transaction volume. Specifically, since December 5th, 2023, the network has seen over 3 million new transactions, the highest level since its inception. This congestion was triggered by the introduction of a new token standard called TON20 on the TON blockchain, similar to Bitcoin’s BRC-20. This standard was developed by the Tonano team.
In response to the network congestion, the TON blockchain team reassured users and explained that, “TON was originally designed to handle large transaction volumes, but the network still has some validators that do not meet the standard and run on weak hardware. This has caused unnecessary network congestion recently.”
To address the issue, in addition to penalizing underperforming validators, the blockchain has introduced a solution to improve the entire system. This includes releasing new software and requiring all validators to update urgently.
As for Tonano, after launching TON20 on December 4th, the team had to temporarily halt minting the standard token on December 7th due to the issues on the TON network.
The Ordinals Inscription trend has also spread to other blockchains with copy-paste versions such as DRC-20 on Dogecoin, RRC-20 on Polygon, SPL-20 on Solana, ASC-20 on Avalanche, FRC-20 on Fantom, and Ethscriptions on Ethereum.
Notably, alongside the proliferation of copy versions, the fate of the original BRC-20 is uncertain, as the Bitcoin Core team has collectively announced plans to phase them out by 2024. However, removing BRC-20 tokens from Bitcoin Core might be challenging, as these tokens continue to operate successfully. For instance, Ordinals (ORDI), a BRC-20 token listed on Binance, has shown impressive growth recently, attracting significant capital flow into the BRC-20 ecosystem.