Inscription Trend Spreads to Fantom and Avalanche, Transaction Fees Skyrocket

On November 23, 2023, the Fantom (FTM) network witnessed a record surge in daily transaction volume, leading to a significant increase in gas fees over the past 24 hours.

Activity on the network has surged, with transaction volume skyrocketing from approximately 338,000 to an all-time high (ATH) of 2.945 million, marking an increase of over 770% within just 24 hours.

The surge in network usage has driven transaction costs to spike dramatically. According to FTMScan data, average transaction fees surged to over 9,000 gwei, with peaks reaching between 10,000 to over 13,000 gwei.

Many users on the network attribute the surge to investors minting and inscribing "FRC-20" tokens—inspired by Ordinals on Polygon—featuring the text "fans."

Not only on Fantom, but the transaction volume on Avalanche's C-Chain also hit an all-time high of over 6.3 million transactions on the same day. Similarly, investors intensified minting and inscription of tokens under the "ASC-20" standard, seeking tokens with the inscription "aval."

This trend began to explode in early November 2023 on the Polygon network, where a large number of users minted "PRC-20" tokens featuring the text "POLS." These tokens were created using calldata transactions on the Polygon blockchain instead of the traditional ERC-20 token standard.

PRC-20 and FRC-20 represent new token standards with similarities to BRC-20 of the Ordinals protocol on Bitcoin, involving a process known as "inscription" that attaches data to individual satoshis on the Bitcoin network, utilizing calldata from each transaction to embed images or data into blockchain blocks, transforming them into unique NFTs.

The development team behind FRC-20 remains unidentified, though most discussions on this new token standard on social media platform X (Twitter) originate from the Chinese cryptocurrency community.

Despite the sharp increase in transaction volume and gas fees, the price of the FTM token on the Fantom network has seen minimal volatility. FTM has only increased by over 5% to $0.3064 from its opening price of $0.29.

Chart showing the FTM/USDT pair at 06:29 PM on November 23, 2023, on Binance.