Since Luxor, a Bitcoin mining pool, mined the 3.96 MB block (#774,628), block sizes on the Bitcoin Blockchain have been higher than ever before. In the last 12 days, blocks larger than 3 MB have become quite common, and demand for ordinal signups has surpassed 65,000 as of this past weekend.
Sustained Blocks Above 3MB Can Be Used as Usual on the Bitcoin Blockchain
The record for the largest block was set on February 1st, 2023, when Luxor mined the 3.96MB block (#774,628). Previously, the highest recorded block size was 2.765 MB, mined by Antpool on August 11th, 2022 (#748,918). At the time, ordinal signups were less than 1000, but the number quickly grew to 50,000 by Friday. By Sunday afternoon February 12, the total number of signups surpassed 66,000.
As a result of the surge in ordinal signups, the cost of sending a BTC transaction has risen. According to recent reports, the cost of Bitcoin Community transactions per swap has increased by 122% since Luxor mined the 3.96MB block. On the day it was mined, the average transaction fee was $1. On Sunday February 12, the average transaction fee was 0.000079 BTC, or $1.74 per swap.
