Reporter: Jaleel, Cookie, BlockBeats
Author: Jaleel, BlockBeats
Last April, also in Hong Kong, the Bitcoin Ordinals community held its first meetup, and according to random interviews by BlockBeats reporters at the main event, Web3 Festival, only a few attendees were familiar with the Ordinals protocol or Bitcoin NFTs.
In just one year, many important things have happened to Bitcoin, including the rise of the Ordinals protocol, the approval of the Bitcoin spot ETF, the flourishing Bitcoin ecosystem, and the completion of the fourth Bitcoin halving. Compared with last year, this year's Bitcoin ecosystem gathering is obviously more lively. During these four days, BlockBeats reporters have been attending the meeting and shared their personal experiences and observations in this article.
Casey's behind-the-scenes story of creating a "virtual casino"
Casey Rodarmor, founder of the Ordinals protocol, was undoubtedly the busiest person during the entire conference, and the scene was comparable to a fan meeting. There was always a large group of people surrounding him at the venue, three layers inside and three layers outside, and everyone wanted to squeeze in and chat with him. This situation reminded people of the scene when Vitalik was surrounded at the Ethereum conference in the past.
The auditorium is always packed when Casey participates in roundtable discussions and sharing sessions.
Casey giving a speech
Many friends in the community wanted to take photos with him, and he always agreed readily, being very down-to-earth, and even learned a few standard photo poses to match everyone. Compared to Vitalik's restraint in social situations, Casey seemed more comfortable, and he looked people in the eye when talking.
Previously, Casey joked that if "the market value of Runes ecosystem does not reach $1 billion within a month of its launch, he will commit suicide." Although the market value has not yet reached the target, there are still a few days before Runes officially launches, so it is not yet time for Casey to "fulfill" his joke promise, but I have not heard any community members ask Casey about this yet.
At the Ordinals Asia conference, Casey gave a very interesting presentation as the closing speech, which contained a lot of information. During the presentation, he mentioned the podcast program "Hell Money" that he and Aaron started about two years ago. The Chinese name of the program is "Hell Money".
When Casey released this picture, the Chinese people present were all happy.
At the same time, it sounds like Casey does understand some of the dissatisfaction of the Chinese community with him, such as the lack of innovation in the Runes protocol. Therefore, he also mentioned that compared to complex technologies such as Taproot Assets and RGB, he certainly respects these technologies and projects, but he is more willing to make something simple for everyone, so there is the Runes protocol.
“Simple things are easy to succeed, complex things are hard to succeed,” Casey said this was an important revelation for him.
At the last night’s Grand Wizard Party, BlockBeats reporters finally got to Casey’s side. Although he was reluctant to accept official interviews from the media, he was obviously happy to communicate with community members.
Left: Casey; Right: BlockBeats reporter Jaleel
I asked Casey if he knew that many friends in the Chinese community now call him C God, just like the Chinese community used to call Vitalik V God. Casey looked me in the eye and said he knew, but he emphasized that he was just an ordinary guy like everyone else.
Domo is obviously more chill after taking off his mask
Compared to Casey, Brc20 founder Domo is less talkative. There are fewer people around Domo, largely because no one knows what he really looks like.
Because Domo has always maintained a high degree of anonymity, in previous public events, he always wore a hat, sunglasses and a mask. Because his facial features could not be seen, Domo was once mistaken for a Chinese.
Domo's previous conference photos are "fully armed"
At this conference, although Domo was reluctant to take photos, he no longer wore a mask or sunglasses.
According to Bitcoin ecosystem observer and player 0xSea who revealed to BlockBeats, on the first day of the Bitcoin Asia conference, Domo walked around the venue casually, almost no one could recognize him, and he was chiller than ever.
Domo's photo at the conference (sixth from left), source: Jack Kong
In the communication with friends in the community, a topic that is often mentioned is: "After the emergence of Runes, will BRC20 still have a market?" or "Will BRC20 disappear?" There are big differences of opinion on this issue.
First, most people don’t seem to understand the specific differences between Ordinals, Runes, and BRC20. This suggests that there is still a lot of education and popularization work to be done in the market.
Secondly, after communicating with some project founders who are developing Bitcoin DeFi protocols, BlockBeats found that some of them believe that BRC20 is more suitable for DeFi assets because BRC20 has been developed for a longer time than Runes. Although the emergence of Runes has had a greater impact on the BRC20 Meme, it is expected that more Bitcoin DeFi projects and tokens with real value will appear in the future.
However, a considerable number of community members and projects have directly stated that BRC 20 will soon be eliminated because Runes has been optimized based on BRC-20 and also saves a lot of gas fees.
Capital also favors Bitcoin
There were also many VC investors participating in the Hong Kong conference, including some from traditional VCs and family offices, who were also extremely interested in investment opportunities in the blockchain industry, especially Bitcoin.
The event of Waterdrop Capital was undoubtedly the most lively VC event. Before the party started, there were already 20 to 30 friends waiting to enter the venue. As the venue had strict restrictions on the number of people, even Casey had to queue downstairs for a long time before going upstairs.
According to incomplete statistics, most of the projects invested by Waterdrop Capital in the Bitcoin ecosystem are very well-known, including Merlin, Bevm, B2, Bison Labs, CKB, DLC.link, OmniBOLT, Map Protocol, NostrAssets, UXUY, Unisat, Lumoz, Nubit, Ordz Games, BitSmiley, Satoshi Protocol, etc. It can be said that Waterdrop Capital is currently the most active domestic VC in investing in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
In fact, when BlockBeats interviewed Dashan, co-founder and managing partner of Waterdrop Capital last year, Dashan expressed that he was very optimistic about the Crypto market in 2024, which is why they launched two digital asset funds in collaboration with China Taiping Investment Management (Hong Kong) Co., Ltd.
Ordinals NFT community is the favorite place for foreigners
If Bitcoin Asia is more like a good place for business cooperation, then Ordinals Asia is definitely a good place to make friends and have fun.
At this Bitcoin party, the most degen was the Ordinals NFT community, especially Pizza Ninjas, Taproot Wizards, and Blob.
Pizza Ninjas founder TO's thick beard earned him the nickname "The Bearded Man", and many of his friends even think he looks a little like Twitter founder Jack Dorsey.
Left: BlockBeats reporter Cookie; Right: Pizza Ninjas founder TO
TO was wearing a bright orange Ninja Pizza-themed outfit on the yacht, which was particularly eye-catching. Some people in the community jokingly called him the "Da Ji" of the Ordinals circle. The Ninja Pizza community chartered a yacht, and more than 40 holders participated. The reason why more holders could not participate was that the yacht could not accommodate them, so TO held a dinner for the remaining more than 20 holders on the second night.
The event party hosted by the great wizard Taproot Wizards was held at the last night of Ordinals Asia. People dressed in wizard costumes filled the venue, and there was a swimming pool for everyone to take a bath.
Taproot Wizards Team Member Tyler Whittle
After communicating with some English Ordinals players, BlockBeats reporters found that they also said that the way the Great Wizard took a bath to get the white ticket was a bit "PUA". It seems that we Chinese are not the only ones who cannot appreciate the charm of taking a bath.
At the venue, BlockBeats reporters also "caught" Tyler Whittle, a member of the Taproot Wizards team. When faced with this question, he said that the team actually knew that there was a gap between Chinese and foreign cultures, so they would find ways to strengthen communication with the Chinese community.
Left: Taproot Wizards team member Tyler Whittle; Right: BlockBeats reporter Jaleel
Experiencing it in person at the Wizarding World event, I was truly able to deeply feel the cohesion of the Wizarding World community. It was quite shocking. The proportion of foreign community members from all over the world was unusually high. Artists, developers and other people of all kinds also came. Everyone had a great time and enjoyed themselves.
As for the Blob holders' party, it was also crowded, and the food provided at the venue was the most special of the whole event, all of which were authentic Hong Kong local food.
After Blob used 33 BTC to bid for the epic rare satoshi of Bitcoin's fourth halving and issued the epic rune, it is one of the runes with the best community atmosphere. The recursive rune concept submitted by Blob will also be a narrative worth looking forward to in the future.
Two founders of Blob: Eloc, a contributor to the Ordinals protocol code, and Nuro, an Ordinals OG artist, were on site to paint for everyone, including T-shirts and masks. Nuro was very quiet when he was creating, which was a bit of a contrast.
Blob founder nuro
BlockBeats and the Blob team also discussed many details during the project's advancement, including that the team initially wanted to issue it in the Free Mint format, but at the suggestion of Dr. Jin Gou, the Blob team finally decided to airdrop directly.
During the airdrop, the team was also participating in the NFTNYC2024 event, so Eloc and Nuro ran around New York, visiting art exhibitions, VIP backstage lounges, Times Square, etc., while using their mobile phones to engrave Blobs and send airdrops to the community.
Left: BlockBeats reporter Jaleel; Right: Blob founder nuror
Bitcoin Layer 2 will still be the main narrative
At the main venue of the Bitcoin Asia Conference, the first thing that comes into view when entering the Bitcoin Asia booth is the booth of Unisat and its invested projects.
In addition, the most common booths are those of Bitcoin Layer 2 projects. Many friends who attended the conference felt that there are really many Bitcoin Layer 2 projects. The current status of Bitcoin ecology is that there are many Layer 2 chains and few applications, which is somewhat opposite to the current status of Ethereum ecology.
It seems that BTC Layer2 will remain an important narrative for a long time to come. In the short term, the ones that can succeed are those with good "fathers", and in the long term, only those with real user needs can succeed.
When chatting privately with many BTC Layer2 project teams, they would actually say very frankly, "We are not actually a second layer in the strict sense, it is more out of the need for market promotion." After all, no one in the market can have a definitive and final definition of Bitcoin's second layer.
It took Ethereum seven years to reach its current level of scalability. At present, it is impossible for Bitcoin Layer 2 to achieve similar scalability in just one or two years. There will be a lot of trial and error and failure in the process.
Solana and Bitcoin, 1+1 is greater than 2
Since Runes went live in April, more than a dozen trading platforms, including Unisat and OKX Web3 Wallet, have supported Runes market trading on the first day. Although Magic Eden started later and did not start trading until April 22, it quickly surpassed other platforms and became the leader with the best depth in the Runes market.
The rapid growth of Runes is mainly due to the huge liquidity and market base it has established on Solana. In addition, Magic Eden has its own wallet, which can attract users from both Bitcoin and Solana ecosystems and help them achieve seamless transactions between the two platforms.
In addition to Magic Eden, BlockBeats reporters also talked with several other projects at the venue that promote the interoperability between Solana and Bitcoin, such as Zeus, THORSwap and Cube.Exchange.
At the Bitcoin Devcon conference on May 8, Justin, the founder of the Zeus network, shared his idea of Solana as the second layer network (L2) of Bitcoin in his speech. He criticized some projects for using Bitcoin only as "gas", believing that doing so did not fully tap the true value and potential of Bitcoin.
Justin said that Solana was chosen as Bitcoin's L2 because of its high performance, low cost, and strong user and developer community. He then detailed how the Zeus network uses a "slot" version to connect to the Bitcoin mainnet, forming a 1.5-layer solution, which not only improves the performance of Bitcoin applications, but also broadens its scalability.
Justin, founder of Zeus
As a cross-chain DEX aggregator based on THORChain, THORSwap is able to complete token swaps between multiple chains with minimal slippage. According to THORSwap’s paper, their most recent large transaction record was 114.7545 $WBTC (worth $7.4M) exchanged for 114.0027 BTC, with a slippage of only 0.05%.
Through THORSwap, liquidity between Solana and Bitcoin can also be easily converted on-chain. According to CoinGecko data, THORChain's RUNE and Stack's STX have been among the best performing tokens over the past year, often following Bitcoin's gains.
Bartosz, the founder of Cube.Exchange, had been developing on Solana. After Runes was launched, they implemented the function of buying Runes with USDC or selling Runes to get USDC. In his opinion, Bitcoin and Solana are very complementary in terms of account model, communication level and developer community.
Bartosz believes that the collaboration between the two very different communities of Bitcoin and Solana will make the market stronger. Bringing the decentralized spirit of Bitcoin to Solana will undoubtedly be beneficial, and introducing popular products on Solana to the Bitcoin ecosystem will also bring huge synergies.
