In an unexpected turn of events, XRP Ledger experienced an unprecedented surge in activity, with daily transactions skyrocketing by an astounding 350% within the last 24 hours, reaching a staggering 4.11 million transactions. This marks the highest activity level in the past two years, surpassing the November 2021 record.
Digging into the data provided by XRP Scan, an equally remarkable 168% surge in unique sender addresses was observed during the same period. Additionally, the number of payments from one account to another surged to 3.2 million, a peak not witnessed since November 2019. XRP Ledger, the native blockchain for XRP, seemed to be in the throes of on-chain fervor, leaving the crypto community baffled.
The cause of this surge lies in a recently unveiled project named XRP Script, making waves in the XRP community. This initiative aims to introduce inscriptions on XRP Ledger, allowing users to embed arbitrary data, essentially creating native digital artifacts, commonly known as NFTs.
Inscriptions, but with XRP
Market participants quickly embraced this new frontier, flooding XRPL with masses of “XRP20” inscriptions. They attempted to inscribe arbitrary data on XRP drops, the smallest denomination of XRP, similar to how inscriptions worked in Bitcoin, with sats. This triggered a surge in transactions, overloading the XRP Ledger, a trend seen on other networks that embraced inscriptions.
Repeat after me: The XRPL is not a UTXO chain. The XRPL cannot support ordinals or their inscriptions. Projects that *mint* ordinals on the XRPL are nonsensical spam. https://t.co/9NgzdTZlAI
— RichardAH 🪝 (@RichardXRPL) December 26, 2023
Prominent XRPL developers weighed in on the situation, with the chief technology officer at XRPL Labs dismissing the project as nonsensical spam. Ripple’s Neil Hartner noted the suspension of the XRPL inscription mint, but transaction spamming persisted.
Wietse Wind, on the other hand, expressed gratitude for the unintentional stress test on the XRPL mainnet due to fake inscription transaction spam.
