In the 15 years since its inception, Bitcoin has rarely been used for purposes other than peer-to-peer transfers and value storage. But with the emergence of the Ordinals protocol, this ancient public chain has also taken on new life.
Since December 14, 2022, more than 1.6 million NFTs have been minted on the Bitcoin network. These NFT types include images, text, audio, and applications, and each NFT can be associated with Satoshi (s ats), which is the smallest unit of Bitcoin, and they all have a unique serial number.
As the Ordinals protocol gradually gained the attention of a wider audience, the off-site transaction volume of early-launched Bitcoin NFTs (such as Ordinal punks) surged, making more and more NFT enthusiasts excited about it. Blue-chip NFTs such as Yuga Labs, NFT markets such as Magic Eden, and leading exchanges such as OKX and Binance took the lead in targeting opportunities and supported the Ordinals ecosystem one after another, driving the explosive growth of its usage.
But compared to the prosperity on the Ethereum chain, Bitcoin is like a barren land with few infrastructure and auxiliary tools. Currently, the playable areas are mainly concentrated in Ordinals NFT, BRC-20 tokens and BTC domain names.
Below, Odaily Planet Daily will take a look at the current development status of these three fields.
"BRC-20" facilities are still incomplete
The "BRC-20" innovation experiment has been online for nearly two months, and Fomo is still going on.
The early ordi tokens have increased by a hundred times since they were minted. With the gradual dispersion of market hotspots, "BRC-20", as an early innovative concept with "meme" attributes and endorsed by the BTC ecology, has once again become the most popular in the market recently. focus of the chase.
The "BRC-20" token standard was created by Twitter user @domodata on March 8, 2023. Although the creator has repeatedly stated that this is just an innovative experiment, the original purpose was to try to create a benchmarking The "ERC-20" token standard model, which implements the functions of deploying token contracts, minting tokens, and transferring tokens on Bitcoin as much as possible, is worthless.
However, as a part of the BTC ecosystem, the "BRC-20" token has more room for hype than BTC NFT, and the token standard created by @domodata is simple and easy to understand, and anyone can use it based on this one-click Therefore, tokens such as meme, punk, pepe and sats have been deployed within one day of the token standard being launched. At present, there are more than 4,000 "BRC-20" Token projects.
But as @domodata said, these tokens have no utility value, just a way to store a script file in bitcoin and use that file as a way to endow tokens with satoshis, which then allow them to be transferred from one user to another The way. Moreover, the "BRC-20" ecological infrastructure is almost zero, there is no Liquidity exchange, the security of token transactions cannot be guaranteed, and there are still many defects.
The only open UniSat trading market was attacked by double spending due to its code loopholes, allowing attackers to take the opportunity to create fake tokens that were not recorded by the protocol, causing about 70 transactions to be affected, but had no choice but to shut down the service to continue maintain.
In addition, although the "BRC-20" token name is minted on a first-come, first-served basis, the supply quantity of the token can be set, so compared with the unique nature of the domain name, it cannot arouse a large number of squatting craze. At present, it can only rely on the "meme" attribute of the token name to create a wave of Fomo in the early stage.
However, judging from the market sentiment, this is unlikely to prevent retail investors from investing more time, energy and money on defective facilities, but will arouse more enthusiasm among developers . I believe that we are likely to see a large number of Emergence of tools for deploying, minting, sending and receiving “BRC-20” tokens.
Ordinals NFT may become the main application scenario of capital
Unlike "BRC-20", Ordinals NFT appeared the earliest and its infrastructure developed the fastest.
Compared with NFT made by ETH or other smart contracts , Ordinals NFT is directly engraved on a single satoshis, and then included in a block on the Bitcoin blockchain, completely residing on the blockchain, without the need for sidechains or separate tokens. In this sense, Ordinals NFT inherits the simplicity, immutability, security and durability of Bitcoin itself. And users can view the time and order in which satoshis were mined, and even give Ordinals NFT rarity according to various criteria such as how long ago it was mined, whether it participated in a famous transaction, etc., making it a collectible or transaction value.
Currently, Taproot Wizards, Pepe, and Bitcoin Punks are the most famous Ordinals NFT series. Yuga Labs' "Twelvefold" successfully bid for a maximum of 7.115 BTC , which also expanded the influence of Ordinals NFT. Currently, its floor price is 24 ETH.
Although the post-empowerment gameplay of these NFTs is still unclear, the emergence of Ordinals NFT also allows us to witness a unique moment in the history of Bitcoin, where investment is more inclined to innovative typical use cases. The narrative revival of Bitcoin NFTs will also reshape the ancient, stereotyped view of the Bitcoin blockchain by users and investors.
Compared with a month ago, the infrastructure of the Ordinals ecosystem is more complete.
OpenOrdex uses Partially Signed Bitcoin Transactions (PSBT) to enable the buying and selling of NFTs. PSBT can realize trustless transactions without smart contracts; it avoids the insecurity of buying and selling through OTC channels, and is considered a basic but critical technology in this application scenario.
Xverse launched the "Restore Assets" function, which can solve the problem of transferring BTC assets and Ordinals NFT to the wrong address.
OrdinalsBot can quickly complete NFT minting. There are also a series of tools that provide support for the Ordinals ecosystem, such as analyzing reserve price data.
According to a research report by Galaxy, the market size of Ordinals NFT will reach 4.5 billion US dollars by 2025, and the market infrastructure of Ordinals NFT will tend to be perfected by the second quarter of 2023. Developers will also continue to explore new decentralized software or Bitcoin scaling technologies. These new use cases will continue to drive interest and adoption in Bitcoin.
Bitcoin domain name, the next hype outlet
Domain names, like NFTs, have great hype value and room for development. It can be confirmed by referring to the development history of the Ethereum domain name. For the Bitcoin blockchain, which is not yet fully developed, they are still young compared to the millions of registrations of the Ethereum domain, so we are still in the early days.
At present, there are two main bitcoin domain name systems in the market: the BNS system based on Stacks Network and the domain name project based on Ordinals.
While both Stacks and Ordinals use the Bitcoin blockchain, they have different features and use cases. Stacks allow developers to build complex Dapp that can interact with Bitcoin, while Ordinals provide a simple and elegant way to record data on the Bitcoin blockchain without using smart contracts.
Therefore, the domain name projects built on both also have their own characteristics.
At present, most domain name applications integrated with Stacks are also mainly used in Stacks Network, which integrates Lightning Network , can support transfer functions and represent identities in Web3.
The Ordinals domain name project is more like a text NFT of the Ordinals ecosystem, and all data will be permanently stored in the first layer of Bitcoin. Bitcoin domains will always be searchable and usable as long as Bitcoin exists. But without a smart contract, is the Ordinals domain usable? Or it can only exist as a text NFT. The BTCDomain project has found a solution.
BTCDomain can now be fully resolved. Users can freely use domain names to send and receive NFT and BTC on the platform. In addition, BTCDomain has also achieved a major breakthrough in product and technology. After registering on the official website or purchasing a ". BTC" domain name in the secondary market, the domain name can not only be resolved to your Bitcoin address, but the holder can also create A homepage that relies entirely on the BTC Mainnet for data storage and analysis. The following is a demo example of "BTC ": BTC , website analysis is entirely based on on-chain data. This function breaks the boundary between Web2 and Web3, and greatly enriches the usage scenarios of Bitcoin domain names.
In addition, BTCDomain has built a user-friendly domain name registration and management system. Third-party applications have also begun to integrate this new domain name resolution function. It is worth noting that BTCDomain also adopts ZK technology, which makes Bitcoin a usable data chain, creating a system similar to smart contracts, which is completely native to Bitcoin. With ZK technology, users can confirm the security of the system through mathematical proofs.
Of course, the development of Bitcoin domain names is still in its early stages, and there are still many technical and practical issues that need to be resolved urgently. However, with the development of the Bitcoin ecosystem, the application scenarios of domain name services will be more extensive.
