Blockchain inscriptions have been arguably the most controversial topic in the blockchain space this year.
This new kind of technology started on Bitcoin, but has now expanded to several other blockchains, as everyone struggles to get a piece of these "permanent NFTs".
Controversial or not though, these new NFTs are clogging up blockchains, and many are starting to crash.
To put things simply, about half a dozen blockchains have either crashed or experienced performance issues as of late, due to blockchain inscriptions.
These blockchains include Avalanche, Arbitrum, Cronos, zkSync and quite recently, Celestia.
Of all the above-mentioned blockchains, Arbitrum's was the most grandiose. The Ethereum L2 solution crashed on December 15, for a little more than one hour.
Mempools are growing, transaction fees are skyrocketing, blockchains are crashing, and Inscriptions are getting more popular by the day.
According to data from Dune Analytics, 16 December saw the highest amount of gas fees spent on blockchain inscriptions since their inception, at around $8.3 million.
As shown by the chart above, the popularity and number of blockchain inscriptions are rising by the day.
According to a tweet from Polygon founder, Sandeep Nailwal, inscription creators may now be switching to Polygon because of its low fees and cheap transactions.
Nailwal notes that Polygon now has the highest number of inscriptions so far, at around 161 million.
This is significantly higher than BNB, the second-ranked chain for inscriptions. Interestingly enough, Nailwal says that gas fees on Poygon are still under 10 cents.
Solana, on the other hand, has had a long history of outages.
In fact, according to Solana's official status page, the network has experienced at least seven incidents of partial or full downtime over the last two years, with most of them occurring in 2022 alone.
According to Flipside as well, Solana inscriptions shot up in number to about 287 thousand inscriptions, bringing the total to nearly a million inscriptions on Solana.
Solana has also been rising in fees since October, showing rising competition for scarce network resources.
Overall, some of the only major chains to have not suffered from outages due to ordinals are Solana and Polygon.
While Polygon appears to be taking the most of the heat and doing fine so far, there might be a different story for Solana.
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