If there was a suggestion that the hype around ordinals—a way to register the media on the Bitcoin blockchain similar to NFT—was dead, this idea was destroyed today. The buzz is only growing and going wild, especially now that someone has figured out how to create a form of “fungible tokens” using the Ordinals protocol.
Ordinal registrations hit a new high of around 31,700 today, year-to-date, per a Dunes dashboard that tracks public blockchain data. And it’s all thanks to the launch of “BRC-20”, an experimental way of using technology to allow people to mint and transfer whatever tokens they please through the Bitcoin blockchain.
It is the latest evolution of the Ordinals saga which has angered some bitcoin maximalists, but also got many creators and collectors excited about the growing possibilities around the original blockchain network. Now the technology is used in an analog to the ERC-20 token standard on Ethereumbut it is still very early and experimental.
A pseudonymous on-chain data enthusiast named Dom launched the implementation of the BRC-20 Wednesday. Domestic calls BRC-20– short for “Bitcoin Request for Comment” – an experience inspired by another pseudonymous user’s tweet with the Satellite names (.sats) standard.
“I [heard] about the possibility of BRC-20 in recent days on Twitter and was curious if I could apply the .sats name format to create it,” said Domo Decrypt by telegram. “Basically what I was trying to do was see if I could create an off-chain state with the tools I had at hand (Dune analysis) and registrations.
There have been 23,926 BRC-20 ordinal registrations in the past 24 hours.
It only took 6 weeks for people to figure out how to use ordinals to create fungible parts. At this point, nothing surprises me. pic.twitter.com/CnHD3qRTcA
— Leonidas.og (@LeonidasNFT) March 9, 2023
Domo’s Ordi token kicked things off on Wednesday, but meme-inspired tokens like Doge, Pepe, and even Meme himself have been rolling out to users through BRC-20 and Ordinals ever since.
According to Dune, the vast majority of ordinal inscriptions created since the BRC-20 went live are text-based. In total, more than 385,000 total registrations have been made through the Ordinals to date, with almost all of them taking place in the past six weeks.
“This is part of a broader trend of textual inscriptions becoming more popular due to their small file size, which can be as low as a few bytes,” pseudonymous historian NFT Leonidas said Decrypt on Twitter. “Because you pay a fee proportional to the size of the file to register, it costs much less to register JSON [code] or text.
Mining pools really need to send @domodata a gift basket for all that paid traffic it drives.
Domo threw a toy over there and people jumped on it, now I’m gonna have to sell a kidney to list anything today.
— Psifour (@Psifour) March 9, 2023
Launched at the end of January thanks to Segwit and Taproot updates of the Bitcoin network, Ordinals took the crypto world by storm as more and more enthusiasts came to the original blockchain network to create what were colloquially known as Bitcoin NFTs. They don’t work exactly like NFTs on Ethereum, for example, but the end result is similar.
So far, the Ordinals protocol has been used for a wide range of on-chain media registrations, including artwork, profile pictures, playable gamesAnd video-based web applications. Even Bored Ape Yacht Club creator Yuga Labs auctioned his own original art collection via the ordinals, grossing $16.5 million In the process.
According to a report published last week by galaxy researchthe rapidly growing Bitcoin NFT market could be worth $4.5 billion by 2025
Despite the social media buzz surrounding BRC-20 tokens and increased signups, Domo said it should by no means be seen as the “norm” for Bitcoin-based tokens. They warned against anyone mass-minting such tokens on Twitter, calling them “worthless”, and recommends other vendors to design and code their own more robust solutions.
But it is a starting point. Although it was a fun experience, the launch of BRC-20 has already captured the imagination of many Bitcoin users. Domo said the responses were better than expected.
“I haven’t had any angry reactions yet, which I’m relieved for,” they said. “However, some of the more technically inclined have pointed out (and rightly so) that there are much better ways to achieve what I do. And others wonder why at all (fair enough).”
“At the end of the day, it was an experience, and I think the majority understands that,” Domo said. “These people seem to be having fun.”