Bitcoin had become the leading blockchain for non-fungible-token sales by December 30, 2023, with CryptoSlam data showing approximately $853 million in December-to-date volume. The result placed Bitcoin well ahead of Ethereum’s reported $364.79 million and Solana’s approximately $325.14 million.
The comparison marked an unusual change in NFT market structure. Ethereum had supplied the dominant smart-contract environment for the sector, while Bitcoin was designed around transferable coins and unspent transaction outputs rather than a native NFT standard. Ordinal inscriptions nevertheless created a market for identifiable digital artifacts recorded through Bitcoin transactions.
The $853 million figure was a dataset observation, not a regulated market close or a value reported by the Bitcoin protocol. It represented CryptoSlam’s dollar-denominated classification of sales recognized through its indexing methodology as of the December 30 snapshot.
What the snapshot showed
Contemporaneous reporting placed total December NFT sales across tracked blockchains at approximately $1.7 billion. Bitcoin accounted for roughly half of that amount and was reported to be 127.63% above its November total. The same snapshot ranked Ethereum second and Solana third.
Dividing Bitcoin’s reported $853 million by Ethereum’s $364.79 million produces a ratio of approximately 2.34. That calculation supports the limited statement that measured Bitcoin NFT sales were about 2.34 times Ethereum’s in the reviewed month-to-date dataset. It does not establish that Bitcoin had overtaken Ethereum in total NFT market value, number of collections, active users or all-time trading.
Seven of the ten highest-volume collections in the snapshot were attributed to Bitcoin. Across all tracked chains, the source also reported 11,290,812 transactions, 600,744 buyers and 469,389 sellers during December to that point. Buyer and seller figures should be understood as dataset-defined addresses or participants rather than verified counts of unique people; one person can control multiple addresses, while custodial services can represent many customers through fewer addresses.
Why Ordinals changed the comparison
The Ordinal Theory Handbook describes inscriptions as arbitrary content attached to individual satoshis and transferred through ordinary Bitcoin transactions. Inscription content is placed on-chain through a two-transaction commit-and-reveal procedure. Markets and analytics services commonly grouped these artifacts with NFTs even though their construction differed from token standards such as Ethereum’s ERC-721.
That distinction matters. The December result did not show Bitcoin adopting Ethereum’s smart-contract model. It showed trading venues and indexers assigning substantial dollar volume to a new class of Bitcoin-based artifacts.
The activity also connected collectible speculation to Bitcoin block-space demand. Creating and transferring inscriptions required transactions that competed for inclusion in blocks. Higher trading volume could therefore benefit miners through fees, but the sales figure alone cannot establish how much fee revenue inscriptions generated on December 30. A separate transaction-level analysis would be required to isolate that effect.
Limits of the record
The December 30 number was month-to-date and could still change before the UTC month ended. It also depended on exchange-rate conversions, collection coverage, marketplace attribution and treatment of suspected wash trading. CryptoSlam’s current blockchain-ranking framework separates reported sales and identified wash volume, while warning that wash-sale tracking was not complete for every chain.
Later research illustrates why the measurement definition matters. CoinGecko’s 2023 annual report put Bitcoin’s December NFT trading volume at $808 million, using combined CryptoSlam and Dune Analytics data. Its methodology applied wash-trading filters to Ethereum, Polygon and Arbitrum and excluded Cardano for irregular trading behavior. That later estimate corroborated Bitcoin’s December lead but did not reproduce the December 30 total.
The defensible event-day conclusion is therefore comparative rather than absolute: by the December 30 CryptoSlam snapshot, Bitcoin-based artifacts had generated enough measured sales to lead the tracked NFT market. The milestone demonstrated rapid adoption of Ordinals-related trading, while the precise dollar total remained sensitive to timing and methodology.
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