The number of Ordinals inscriptions on Bitcoin’s network has exceeded 10 million within a matter of days of the creator leaving his role at the helm of the project.

On Sunday, Casey Rodarmor stated he had stepped down from his position due to being unable to give the project the desired attention. The role of lead maintainer was subsequently given to a coder known as Raphjaph.

The Ordinals protocol, which was launched back in January, soon became the most widespread way to mint new assets on the Bitcoin blockchain, Cointelegraph reports.

Initially, Ordinals began as a way to inscribe data in the witness portion of BTC transactions, written on individual ‘satoshis’, which are the smallest divisible unit of Bitcoin.

Yet the number of Ordinals subscriptions soared following the launch of the BRC-20 token in March, permitting users to mint entirely new tokens on Bitcoin for the first time ever.

Indeed, the number of Bitcoin-based tokens surged from a few hundred within the first week to over 25,000 at the time of writing, according to BRC-20.io data.

However, Ordinals has been criticised by many Bitcoin supporters, with the method of inscribing assets on the network deemed inefficient and wasteful, particularly in terms of transaction fees and block space, the Cointelegraph report adds.

As a result, some developers have been looking into using smart contracts to mint assets on Bitcoin.

In contrast, a number of Bitcoin advocates have lauded Ordinals for being able to onboard new users into the broader Bitcoin community. 

Although Ordinals have played a key role in Bitcoin’s transaction fees spiking, the rise in network activity has meant miners have seen over $44 million in Ordinals-related fees paid, as per Dune Analytics data.