Bitcoin Ordinals Size Record Broken Again—How Much Bigger Can They Get?

Bitcoin Ordinals and Runes platform OrdinalsBot has created the largest Ordinals inscription to date, weighing in at a hefty 3.969 megabytes. Inscription number 70,614,708, the OrdinalsBot team announced Friday, contains a copy of “A Declaration of Independence in Cyberspace” by Logos Network.

OrdinalsBot co-founder Brian Laughlan told Decrypt that the size of the inscription had less to do with the length of the document, and more to do with publishing the document as an image that would be large enough to read.

“It’s really interesting because the actual text content, if you build that out, would be like two kilobytes,” Laughlan said. “It’s tiny, but what they did was add an image and blew up the image to be that size—just to get that top spot and really make a statement.”

It’s not the first time in recent months that we’ve seen the Bitcoin Ordinals inscription size record broken, but the increases lately have been relatively minuscule—and there isn’t much more room to grow, given the limitations of the Bitcoin blockchain. In this case, the new record inscription was a mere 0.001MB larger than the previous record-holder from March.

The storage capacity on the Bitcoin blockchain was massively upgraded in 2017, Laughlan explained. The Segregated Witness (SegWit) update pushed past the prior 1 megabyte maximum size of a Bitcoin block to 4MB. Attempts to inscribe anything larger will fail.

“Part of our job is making sure we don’t do that,” Laughlan said. “What we’ll do essentially is we’ll craft [the Ordinal] locally, send it to our local Bitcoin nodes, and see if it all goes through—but we won’t even look at it if it’s over 4MB. There’s no point because we know its going to fail.”

Following the launch of the Ordinals protocol in January 2023, OrdinalsBot came online as a way for Bitcoin enthusiasts to capitalize on the new craze with an easy-to-use interface. This March, the OrdinalsBot platform was used to inscribe music Ordinals for rapper French Montana, followed by another music NFT by Wu-Tang Klan’s Ghostface Killah in April.

For large inscription projects like the Logos Network Declaration and the 3.968MB Runestone inscription from March, OrdinalsBot worked with Bitcoin mining company Marathon Digital to add larger amounts of data to a single Bitcoin blockchain block. In this case, the total block came in at 3.99MB, nearly all of which was taken up by the Logos inscription.

“Our engineers and the engineers at Marathon are some of the best Bitcoin developers in the world,” OrdinalsBot co-founder Toby Lewis said. “Watching them work, especially when it’s going for the largest block, you feel like history has been made every time.”

“They’re testing the parameters [and] fine-tuning stuff,” Lewis added, “because they don’t actually know what will work. But from testnet to production is a really exciting moment.”

Boasting over 200,000 users on its platform, OrdinalsBot claims it played a part in creating eight out of the top 10 largest files ever inscribed on Bitcoin, including the aforementioned Runestone, the Ordz Games inscription for the BitBoy One game console, and Inscribed Pepes.

OrdinalsBot also provides backend support for Magic Eden’s inscription services. In April, OrdinalsBot launched the Trio Ordinals utility token using the BRC-20 Bitcoin token standard.

Edited by Ryan Ozawa and Andrew Hayward