Recently, the Web3 community has been talking excitedly about an extremely attractive protocol, NFT Bitcoin. Before that, you only remembered NFT as a unique mechanism appearing on Ethereum, Solana or Polygon... However, now it is officially available on Bitcoin with the name Ordinals.
✍🏻 In this article, I will explore important knowledge in the NFT space in the easiest way for you to understand.
1️⃣ First of all, let's find out what Ordinals is?
First, each Bitcoin is divided into 100 million units called satoshis (or sats). The Ordinals Protocol as a numbering scheme for satoshis allows node operators to track and transfer individual sats on Bitcoin and write data into each sats (Inscripting). For example, if a Bitcoin NFT is named Cryptopunk#123, it can be understood that 123 is Ordinals. In a nutshell, Ordinals is like an NFT protocol that you can mint directly onto the Bitcoin blockchain.
But that's not entirely true. That's just a short understanding!
2️⃣ What are Inscriptions?
Inscriptions are data written to sats (as I said above) with arbitrary content, creating native digital artifacts tied to bitcoin. Inscriptions do not require a separate side-chain or token. Basically you can understand that inscriptions are NFTs and inscripting is mint.
3️⃣ Now let's go over some important differences between the NFT protocol and Ordinals
NFTs on Ethereum (or the Ethereum Virtual Machine blockchain) typically point to off-chain data on the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) — a decentralized file storage system that resembles a Blockchain's hard drive and can be altered using super data. To illustrate, some NFT projects update metadata to improve the visual quality of each NFT. Projects can even require owners to click the “refresh metadata” button on OpenSea to get new images with higher quality.
This ability to change metadata alludes to the shortcoming of NFTs that require so much off-chain data. Furthermore, NFTs often include creator royalties tied to them, while Ordinals do not. And unlike NFTs on Ethereum which use token standards like ERC-721 or ERC-1155, Bitcoin NFTs do not have similar standards. All of this highlights that Bitcoin Ordinals don't just signal a change, they could actually be a major technical improvement to NFTs.
4️⃣ The most notable Ordinal Inscriptions
The Ordinals boom didn't take long. Just a few weeks after launch, attractive collections gradually appeared and brought in increasingly larger sales, with some works even selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Ordinal Punks is one of the most notable projects to emerge. Ordinal Punks are a set of 100 Bitcoin NFTs minted in the first 650 Inscriptions on the Bitcoin chain.
Then there's Taproot Wizards. Starting with Inscription#652, this project is an Ordinals collection of hand-drawn wizard NFTs created by Web3 developer Udi Wertheimer. It is said to be the largest block of transactions in the history of Bitcoin. So why does this project get so much attention? To make the article seamless, I will reveal it in the upcoming parts. ^^
Next up is the Ethereum-based collector — OnChainMonkey (OCM). With Inscription#20,219, the team minted 10,000 Ordinals into a single Inscription, making it one of the first 10k collections on Bitcoin.
Currently, Ordinals exchanges use STX as the main payment currency. This is the native token of the Stacks Network — a layer 2 that leverages the security of the bitcoin blockchain to settle transactions.
🧐 However, Ordinals' Inscriptions are still in their infancy. As the Ordinals market matures, we will likely see a host of other innovative collections emerge. Right now, many blue-chip sets have issued Bitcoin positions, which means that Ordinals is really still retaining its great appeal.
If you find it useful, please give me a share, and ask any questions or concerns that need answering, I will explain in the next articles. Thank you everyone so much for your time!!! ^^
