1. The starting point of everything
14 years ago today, a programmer exchanged 10,000 bitcoins for two pizzas. This was the first time in history that bitcoin was priced. As of the time of writing, according to OKX market information, the current price of BTC has exceeded $70,000. In other words, he spent more than $700 million on this meal.
Everyone loves these legendary stories. Two pieces of pizza that were eaten quickly were sold at the current sky-high price, so there was a Pizza Festival, and countless people subsequently became curious about and explored the Bitcoin ecosystem.
After several rounds of bull-bear cycles, the Bitcoin ecosystem has ushered in a new era. Compared with the core value of "BTC is a value storage tool" that BTC OGs have always insisted on, a group of new believers have emerged in the Bitcoin community. They have set their sights on the unlimited potential of Bitcoin in technological innovation and application expansion, and actively support the update and optimization of the Bitcoin protocol, such as the new asset protocols such as Ordinals and Runes that have recently emerged. Value storage or capital efficiency has also become the focus of debate in the Bitcoin community.
2. Eco-integrated art: a symphony of orthodox ideas and innovative potential
Since 2023, the inscription boom brought about by the birth of the Oridinals protocol and the BRC-20 token standard has made people turn their attention to the asset issuance protocol on Bitcoin again, and diversified protocols such as Atomicals, Runes, BTC Stamps, Taproot Assets have emerged, and standards such as ARC-20, SRC-20, and DRC-20 have also been generated. These new things have brought a new "Fair launch" model to the market and brought huge attention to the Bitcoin ecosystem.
The emergence of new things is often accompanied by some controversy. For example, the BRC-20 protocol has been accused of being centralized and deviating from fairness. Crypto researcher Haotian once pointed out that "there is a logical paradox between the Fomo mechanism of first-come-first-served inscriptions and the mechanism of miners packaging them according to the mining fee, which means that casting is not necessarily fair." Some technicians also pointed out that BRC-20 has some risks in security mechanisms. Ajian, a Bitcoin ecosystem contributor, once said, "The issuance of assets on the Bitcoin chain can only rely on off-chain protocols, and Omni, Counterparty, RGB, Taro, and Ordinals are no exception. No matter what data is written to the chain, it is impossible to convert it into the security mechanism of these assets."
However, are these new things really meaningless? Compared with the liveliness of the Ethereum ecosystem, the Bitcoin ecosystem did not seem to receive enough attention before the inscription craze. But in fact, since the advent of Bitcoin, ecosystem developers have been working hard to improve the scalability of Bitcoin. For example, the SegWit upgrade launched in 2017 introduced the ability to extend blocks and block weights, the colored coins in 2021 added metadata to the Bitcoin blockchain, allowing certain Bitcoins to represent other assets, and the Taproot upgrade in 2021 improved the privacy and efficiency of transactions. These upgrades also laid the foundation for the development of the Ordinals protocol and the BRC-20 token. It can be seen that developers do not just want Bitcoin to stay at the value of "digital gold", but it was not until the outbreak of inscriptions that people really paid attention to the development and possibilities of the Bitcoin ecosystem.
As the Bitcoin ecosystem has received increasing attention, the ecosystem has gradually improved, including the construction of infrastructure such as exchanges and wallets. As an early supporter of the Bitcoin ecosystem, the OKX Web3 wallet has also taken the lead, having previously supported the Ordinals market. In July 2023, the OKX Web3 Ordinals market has become the largest marketplace for BRC 20 token transactions. After the highly anticipated Runes protocol was launched, it quickly integrated it into its own developed market, and launched the Runes self-developed market as soon as possible, where users can mint and trade Runes protocol assets and explore the rune ecosystem in one stop.
OKX Web3 Wallet was also cautious about new things. Despite this, OKX Web3 Wallet has been actively deploying in the Bitcoin field and has supported the Lightning Network a long time ago. Kyle Chen, product manager of Web3 Marketplace, once said in an interview: "We hesitated when deciding whether to fully support the new Bitcoin protocol, because at the beginning we were not sure whether this ecosystem could develop. But with the enthusiastic response from the market, we realized its development potential and decided to increase investment."
3. Experience the diverse ways of playing Bitcoin ecosystem with OKX Web3 wallet
So far, the OKX Web3 wallet has launched the Ordinals, Atomicals, and Runes markets, helping users to experience the latest developments in the Bitcoin ecosystem as soon as possible, while providing users with a one-stop entry for exploring the Bitcoin ecosystem. Users can easily acquire and trade assets through the Web3 wallet; discover and participate in popular projects in the Bitcoin ecosystem; and directly access the DeFi section to achieve on-chain staking of Bitcoin assets and enjoy on-chain benefits with low gas fees.
1. Trading
The OKX Web3 team has been committed to providing users with an extremely smooth trading experience, including the most complete BTC address and transaction analysis, while providing transaction acceleration, low-fee transaction rebroadcasting, and UTXO recovery functions to ensure a smooth and worry-free transaction process.
The OKX Web3 team also focuses on the construction of asset issuance protocols and application layer infrastructure. In addition to taking the lead in supporting the Ordinals market, the OKX Web3 wallet has gradually integrated inscription token standards such as ARC-20, SRC-20, and Runes, providing zero-fee inscription trading services for millions of users. Users can purchase and place orders for BRC-20, ARC-20 and other assets through the OKX Inscription Market, and enjoy a fee-free trading experience. In addition, you can mint and trade BTC NFTs for free on the OKX NFT Market.
In order to further improve the user experience, the OKX Web3 wallet Ordinals market also supports batch purchases and batch transfers. Users can purchase BRC-20 inscriptions and BTC NFTs with one click. A single transaction supports up to 10 orders, meeting the needs of users to sweep the floor price. At the same time, the Runes market now also supports batch sweeps, and up to 20 runes can be purchased with one click. In addition, the Ordinals market also supports batch engraving. Users can perform free batch engraving through the OKX Ordinals market engraving center. Taking BRC-20 as an example, the maximum number of single engravings has been increased to 1,200, and the EVM network engraving is a single automatic engraving of 50, which reduces the tedium of "hand rubbing" by users and is safer, more convenient and efficient.
2. Project search and interaction
The OKX Web3 wallet Discover section can help users quickly discover, explore, and interact with the Bitcoin ecosystem, and discover opportunities and potential projects on the chain. For example, the current OKX Web3 wallet is the first to support the Rune Alpha protocol, which is popular in the community. Users can view and manage Rune Alpha protocol assets and Rune Stone airdrop queries through the OKX Web3 wallet. In addition, the OKX Web3 wallet is now online on the Runes self-developed market, which supports the viewing, transfer, trading, and minting functions of Runes ecological rune assets. Users can experience the product according to their own needs.
At the same time, OKX Web3 Wallet also responded promptly to the community users' demand for interaction with the Nostr Assets protocol on the Lightning Network track, and launched the Nostr Assets batch transfer tool. Through rapid product iteration, OKX Web3 Wallet helped users explore new Bitcoin chain applications as soon as possible.
3. On-chain staking
In the DeFi column of the OKX Web3 wallet, users can find relatively popular projects with high staking returns, stake Bitcoin assets on the chain, and earn on-chain returns with lower Gas. Or they can also participate in the interest rate increase activities launched by OKX DeFi from time to time to increase their returns.
IV. Conclusion
Perhaps value storage or capital efficiency has never been a problem. Bitcoin is not limited to any direction in digital gold or Ethereum-like ecosystems, but through the consensus evolution and continuous innovation of builders and community users, it shows unlimited imagination.
Pizza Day symbolizes the birth of Bitcoin's value. However, what is more important are the Bitcoin ecosystem developers and long-term participants who keep trying new things. Similarly, OKX has never stopped on the road of innovation in the Bitcoin ecosystem, and its adherence to Bitcoin beliefs has always been consistent. Today, Bitcoin has completed its fourth halving and reached a new development cycle. OKX will continue to innovate and stick with Bitcoin and the crypto industry into the next decade.
