There is less than 1 day left in the BTC halving countdown, and it is expected to be halved on April 20. The current block reward is 6.25 BTC. After the halving, the block reward is 3.125 BTC, and the remaining blocks are 253.
Bitcoin halving is undoubtedly one of the most important events in the history of Bitcoin development. Whenever this event approaches, the entire crypto community is full of expectations and excitement.
The impact of this incident is not limited to Bitcoin itself, but will also have a profound impact on the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem, including the NFT ecosystem. In this moment of change and challenge, we can’t help but wonder: How will the Bitcoin halving shape the future of the crypto world?
About Bitcoin Halving
The purpose of the Bitcoin halving is to ensure that the supply of Bitcoin gradually slows down, creating a deflationary economic environment by slowing down the rate at which new Bitcoins are produced. This deflationary feature is designed to maintain the scarcity and value of Bitcoin while encouraging long-term holding and investment, thereby promoting the development of Bitcoin as a long-term sustainable digital currency. Bitcoin has experienced 3 halvings so far:
November 2012: Reduced from 50 to 25 Bitcoins per block.
July 2016: Reduced from 25 Bitcoins to 12.5 Bitcoins per block.
May 2020: Reduced from 12.5 Bitcoins to 6.25 Bitcoins per block.
Potential impact of Bitcoin halving
Price and market performance : Investor sentiment and the overall performance of the crypto market have an impact, and the halving event itself will trigger optimistic market expectations for the future supply and value of Bitcoin. Most people believe that Bitcoin halving will bring about a bull market, and Bitcoin halving still has a strong narrative and expected value.
Miners and network security : Halving will reduce miners’ mining profits, which undoubtedly brings double challenges to miners. On the one hand, as the computing power of the Bitcoin network continues to increase, the cost of upgrading mining machines continues to rise, which means that miners need to bear higher costs to maintain the same mining profits. On the other hand, each halving will halve the block reward income of miners, directly affecting their profit levels, and some marginal miners may quit.
Of course, the Bitcoin halving also highlights the challenges of scalability. As miners’ income decreases, interactive trends may maintain network security by increasing transaction fees, and users may have to bear higher transaction fees. Additionally, Bitcoin's architecture limits programmability, further limiting the ability to develop applications that can use complex features. This situation requires a scaling solution that can accommodate the increased throughput of efficient transactions and the use of scaling, such as trading NFTs, etc.
But in fact, with the encouragement of efficiency improvements and the popularity of the market, the challenges faced by miners in terms of income will be alleviated, and the network will still have sufficient computing power support to maintain the security and decentralization of Bitcoin.
Supply : Halving will reduce the rate of new Bitcoin creation, and each halving of block rewards will further increase the scarcity of Bitcoin. But Bitcoin’s scarcity does need to be considered from multiple perspectives. From the perspective of new increases, it has undoubtedly enhanced its relative scarcity and maintained its positioning as digital gold. But from the perspective of overall circulation, even if the new increment is declining, as long as block rewards continue to flow in, the overall circulation of Bitcoin is actually still increasing.
The halving is often regarded as an important milestone in the history of Bitcoin's development. For the entire encryption market, as a leader in the encryption field, Bitcoin's performance usually has a spillover effect on the entire encryption ecosystem.
NFT market trend and development?
As the rise of the Bitcoin Ordinals inscription ecosystem begins in 2023, Bitcoin's on-chain activity has greatly increased. On November 20 last year, transaction fees on the Bitcoin chain exceeded Ethereum for the first time.
Since the emergence of the Ordinals inscription ecology, more than 20% of miners' income has come from inscription-related activities. At the same time, since December last year, Bitcoin has surpassed Ethereum in the field of NFT transactions and has become the dominant player in NFT transactions.
Judging from the current Bitcoin NFT market, there is a clear surge in Ordinals activity. The Bitcoin Wizard and Rune Pups of the graphic currency concept have surged against the trend, as well as the recently popular Runestone.
Pups/Rune Pups is a project that combines graphics and currency. NFT Rune Pups are deployed on the Ordinal protocol, with a total supply of 230 million, and the total supply of graphics and coins is 1 billion. Since the image of PUPS is a puppet monkey with the Bitcoin logo, it is also called the Bitcoin version of "WIF" by the European and American communities. Its current floor price is around 0.12btc.
What attracted the most attention and participation during the Bitcoin halving was the launch of the Runes protocol. Runes is a new protocol launched by Ordinals founder Casey. It first appeared on Casey's personal blog. It is expected to launch at the beginning of the Bitcoin halving time, which is Bitcoin block height 840,000.
Driven by Runestone's continued record highs and the imminent launch of the Runes protocol, the Bitcoin NFT ecosystem is continuing to heat up, and the ecosystem is becoming increasingly diversified.
Extended reading: The huge wave of "Rune Season" is coming: pay attention to these 7 Bitcoin NFT projects
For now, the transaction scale of the Bitcoin NFT market has greatly surpassed that of Ethereum, and the Bitcoin network is becoming the new center of NFT development. It is worth noting that the average daily minting volume of Ethereum NFTs is declining significantly, from a peak of 300,000 to less than 20,000. Some NFT assets with large-scale data attributes are being transferred from the Ethereum main network to other L2 .
What is even more noteworthy is that the issuance of NFT assets with strong financial attributes has also shown a clear trend of moving from Ethereum to the Bitcoin network. Industry insiders believe that issuance of such NFT assets on the Bitcoin network is becoming the consensus direction for a new round of asset issuance.
We can boldly guess that as the climax of the bull market approaches, the NFT ecosystem may usher in a wave of explosive growth, and the transaction volume of NFTs in the Bitcoin Inscription ecosystem will increase significantly. In this case, the prices of some Bitcoin NFT projects may appear to be quite a bubble, especially top-level projects may receive more attention.
