According to Cointelegraph, Tesla CEO Elon Musk inadvertently made a case for Bitcoin Ordinals, also known as Bitcoin NFTs, while mocking non-fungible tokens (NFTs) during a podcast. In an interview on The Joe Rogan Experience, Musk criticized NFT projects for not encoding the JPEG on-chain, stating that if the company housing the image goes out of business, the image would be lost. Bitcoin enthusiasts argued that Musk's comments actually support the use case for Bitcoin Ordinals, which were launched in January by developer Casey Rodarmor and made possible by the Taproot soft fork in November 2021.
Cryptocurrency analyst Will Clemente praised Musk's comments, noting that there are over 38 million Ordinals inscriptions on Bitcoin's blockchain. Rohun "Frank" Vora, the creator of NFT projects DeGods and y00ts, also agreed with Musk, stating that Ordinals are the most elegant solution to one of the most universal criticisms of NFTs. An Ordinals developer known as "Leonidas" even inscribed a 19-second video of Musk's comments into Bitcoin's blockchain at block 814,773.
However, not all NFT projects on Ethereum face the same issue as Musk pointed out. For example, Larva Labs moved its Cryptopunks NFTs on-chain in August 2021 after they lived off-chain for the first four years. Despite this, Ethereum remains home to 84% of all NFT trading volumes, with Bitcoin and ImmutableX coming in second and third with market shares of 11% and 2.5% respectively, according to CoinGecko data from June.
