I noticed that there was a jump in the number of transactions per block (from ~2000 to ~3000) in April-May 2023.
The size of the serialised UTXO set also ~doubled from ~5GB to ~10GB over the following year (based on charts at satoshi.info).
What reasons might there be?
The blame is on BRC-20, a terribly inefficient token protocol built on Ordinals that saw a lot of use during that time. BRC-20 requires a huge number of small transactions, which drives down the average transaction size and consequently increases the number of transactions per block.
