Bitcoin Ordinals – Will The Bitcoin NFT Ecosystem be Worth $4.5 Billion by 2025?

Bitcoin Ordinals has been getting a lot of attention in the NFT space – total inscriptions surged to 594050 as of March 26, 2023
Degods NFT can be seen on the magic Eden with a floor price of 0.988 BTC. It is one of the most traded ordinals

The NFT market has grown 10-fold since 2021. Today there are several NFT marketplaces that control a significant volume of day-to-day NFT transactions. If we look at recent transaction volumes by token terminal, Blur’s volume stands at $48.1 million (at press time) and Opensea has a volume of $9.3 million.

Blur accounts for more than 70% of the market volume, which is significant because it happened in the last couple of months. After February 2, 2023 a constant increase in the BLUR day-to-day volume was witnessed in comparison to other tokens. In terms of daily traders, Open Sea remains the largest marketplace.

Apart from these two marketplaces, there are several others with different types of NFTs. One of the types which has been in the limelight recently, is Ordinals. Before learning what Ordinals are, it is important to understand a little bit about BRC 20.

BRC20 is a token standard which was created by Onchain data enthusiast whose Twitter handle name is “domo”. BRC 20 is similar to Ethereum standards (ERCs) but is much simpler due to limitations of the Bitcoin Blockchain. BRC20 is not a standard, but it has a lot of potential to be a set standard or something better that could merge as a set standard in the future. One can see the number of tokens on BRC20.io and their mints. (* BRC-20 is not a set standard for the Bitcoin Ordinals)

Ordinals and how it works

Ordinals: A Multi Vector NFT?

Ordinals have taken the world by storm and many NFT and crypto enthusiasts are moving towards it. Ordinals was developed by Casey Roadarmor. Ordinals do not have functions exactly like NFT on Ethereum but can be used in different ways. Ordinals can be used for a wide array of things for Onchain activity like Profile Pictures, Video Based apps, games and many more. Here’s an Ordinal:

This is the original Bitcoin Logo which was created by Satoshi in March 2009. It was recently purchased by a NFT enthusiast who goes by the Twitter handle “LeonidasNFT” “https://twitter.com/LeonidasNFT?s=20”. It is an ordinal inscription on the Bitcoin Blockchain. The price of this particular NFT was 4 BTC. Before going any further, let’s look at the definition of ordinals one more time: Bitcoin ordinals are Satoshis which have been inscribed with a piece of information like image or Texts. Ordinals do not require any side chains or any other tokens. Ordinals are not really fungible on the Protocol Level. On a social level, they can be termed as unique because a unique piece of information is added into it.

How Ordinals Work:

Suppose you want to store “The Coin Republic” on a blockchain, then firstly you have to wrap it into an “Envelope” which is repurposed code and store it into the Taproot Output. One of the main roadblocks for Ordinals are the size of Bitcoin Blocks which is 4 MB. It poses a challenge for developers and others. One of the most important things which can make Ordinals unique is that it could carry several inscriptions as per “Delphi Digital report.”

This can make Ordinals a Multivector which could push its use case further.

Ordinals are currently listed on various marketplaces like Magic Eden, Ordinals wallet, OrdSwap, and many more. Most unique users are currently present on the Ordinal wallet. One can connect their wallet on Ordinals Wallet and buy their NFT

Conclusion

Bitcon’s market capitalization is $538 billion – the highest among all cryptocurrencies. Segwit and Taproot upgrades have changed the block size of Bitcoin which has made a path for Ordinals. Recently, a report by Galaxy research said that the Bitcoin NFT ecosystem may grow up to $4.5 Billion in 2025. It would be wrong not to say that Ordinals will bring a paradigm shift in the NFT ecosystem. It would also be wrong not to say that Ordinals will add a huge value to the Bitcoin chain and be useful for their users.