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Ordinals Fees and the Halving: ASIC Jungle at Mining Disrupt Miami 2023
At Mining Disrupt Miami 2023, Mohamad Abdulrazak of ASIC Jungle argued that inscription fees were already paying miners ahead of the halving.
More than eighteen hundred bitcoin. That is how much, by Mohamad Abdulrazak's count, Ordinals inscriptions had paid miners in fees by the summer of 2023. Abdulrazak, head of marketing at ASIC Jungle, brought that figure to Mining Disrupt Miami 2023, held July 25 to 27, 2023. When he spoke, bitcoin traded at $29,144. On October 15, 2026, it was $80,894.
ASIC Jungle sells mining hardware and offers hosting and consultancy, but this talk was not about machines. It was about two new uses of the Bitcoin chain, Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens, and whether they pay the people who secure it.
Ordinals, he explained, add functionality to Bitcoin. Traditionally every coin is identical and interchangeable. Ordinals introduce ordinal satoshis, which can carry information such as text, images, audio or applications, and they make non-fungible tokens possible on Bitcoin. BRC-20 uses the same protocol to mint and transfer fungible tokens, through a process called inscribing. He stressed that none of this changes the Bitcoin software. Developers are using it in a new way.
He put numbers on the market. On July 10, ORDI, the first BRC-20 token, had a trading volume of about $11.16 million, and the total BRC-20 market cap was about $1.2 billion. "These figures are immense," he said.
Then he asked the question that mattered to the room: does it benefit the miners? His answer was yes. Every inscription is a transaction that has to be verified, and it carries a fee. By his count those fees came to more than eighteen hundred bitcoin, worth about $54 million at the price that day. He called it "a new revenue stream for verifying tokens".
The reason he cared was the halving. The block reward then stood at 6.25 bitcoin and was set to be cut in half the following year. More transaction volume and higher fees, he argued, could help make up the difference, and would help Bitcoin's adoption along the way.
He also looked further ahead, to smart contracts and layer two protocols on Bitcoin, from stablecoins and decentralized exchanges to lending and liquid staking. He finished with the projects building decentralized finance on Bitcoin: Mintlayer, Rootstock, Stacks and Blockstream's Liquid Network, plus ALEX, Stably, Money on Chain, Lava and Oshi.
The halving he described has since come and gone. His fee figures are a snapshot of one summer, taken from the stage in Miami.
The full story is on Mining Disrupt at miningdisrupt dot com, and many more like it play around the clock on Bitcoin Radio.