The native network of the oldest cryptocurrency in the world is taking new directions and is dividing opinions. Those who have followed the trajectory of the digital asset since the beginning have been surprised by the expansion of the bitcoin ecosystem. Some purists, better known as maximalists, don't show much happy with the transformations. Other enthusiasts already see them as an evolution capable of maintaining and reinforcing the relevance of bitcoin in the future. We are experiencing a kind of crypto spring. It is the harbinger of a summer that will have as one of its great catalysts the Bitcoin Halving. The first edition of the event completed 11 years this week, its debut took place on November 28, 2012. We are counting down to the fourth halving.Bitcoin breaks new price record in 2023 and exceeds US$42 thousandLargest crypto broker in the USA, Coinbase says that Brazil is a "priority market" It is certain that in the next bull run the quadrennial event will share the attention with new projects that have been multiplying on the network. And the horizon of these projects being built on top of bitcoin goes beyond the traditional payments functionality. We can already see decentralized finance (DeFi) applications, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and, just as happens on the Ethereum network, a movement towards the growth of layer 2 or Layer-2 solutions, a category that has the successful Lighting Network as a pioneer in bitcoin. If this expansion establishes as a trend, the bitcoin ecosystem could follow the trail of layer 1 networks like Ethereum. However, there are aspects that can make a difference in this trajectory, mainly because bitcoin was not designed from its genesis to house general purpose applications. Developers will have to “break a lot of ground” in improving the user experience. Efforts to make the bitcoin blockchain scalable and generate new use cases seem new, but they are not. In 2012, Colored Coins were already working with the idea of ​​non-fungible assets, years before the first NFT was created on Ethereum. In 2018, new movements in the ecosystem attracted attention, such as the first mainnet implementation of the Lightning Network. The current wave was sparked by the creation of so-called Bitcoin Digital Artifacts or NFTs, based on the Ordinals protocol. The Ordinals protocol allows you to embed (subscribe) additional data to satoshis such as images and videos directly on the bitcoin blockchain. Since the launch of the protocol in early 2023, bitcoin NFTs have boosted trading in the cryptosphere and the number of Ordinals subscriptions in the network exceeds 45 million at the time of writing this column, according to a survey by Dune Analytics. This direct storage on the blockchain is a big “plus” compared to the modus operandi of NFTs in general. In most collections, the art image file is deposited off-chain and what you actually have is a link to the file. This can be a problem for its holders, as there is a risk of alteration or simply disappearing because it is not stored on the blockchain.