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Nifty News: BTC miners cash $5M on Ordinals, Reddit NFTs get botting backlash and more

Bitcoin transaction fees from Ordinals inscriptions have exploded by 240% over the last month.

Bitcoin (BTC) miners have pocketed over $5 million from creating nonfungible token (NFT)-like inscriptions using the Ordinals protocol.

Transaction fees for Ordinals transactions exploded 240% from $1.5 million on March 10 to 5.2 million by April 12, according to Dune Analytics data.

The rise came on the back of a rather slow period between Feb. 16 and March 10, which from $1 million to $1.5 million. Prior to thatfees hit the $1 million mark within the first four weeks of the Ordinals protocol launching on Jan 21.

Transaction fees paid for Ordinals inscriptions hit the $5 million mark on April 11. Source: Dune Analytics

Nearly 1.1 million Ordinals have been inscribed on the Bitcoin network, mostly comprising JPEG images and text but also consisting of PDFs, video and audio formats.

Roughly 100 to 500 inscriptions are processed in each Bitcoin block, which usually contains between 2,000 to 3,000 transactions. Block 783,758 on April 3 saw a record 3,785 inscriptions, representing nearly 87% of the entire block.

Reddit’s Gen3 NFTs plagued by botting claims

Online community platform Reddit launched its third batch (Gen 3) of NFTs on April 12 — a “Futures Realities Collection” of Collectible Avatars created by over 100 artists.

Reddit explained in its announcement that the artists behind each limited edition Avatar will receive royalties upon each sale and no cryptocurrency was needed to purchase them.

However, the release didn't come without issues. Many Reddit users claimed they missed out on the sale because spam bots swooped in almost instantly.

Man also believe the bots were the reason behind Reddit's NFT shop crashing shortly after launch.

"They didn't incorporate any type of spam or bot prevention, like a simple captcha. Of course the site got overloaded," one user wrote with another remarking there was "no way you guys didn’t even think of stopping bots during this drop."

Twitter user "Pastel Alpha" tweeted they managed to get "a good amount" of the NFTs "even though the site completely died" and thanked its "bot partners" for helping with its haul.

Reddit previously released a batch of Halloween-themed avatars in October, which was followed by and Super Bowl avatars in February.

Adidas releases first in series of dynamic NFTs

Shoe brand Adidas has released the first leg of its latest dynamic NFT collection “ALTs by Adidas” the latest move by the company on its quest to expand its NFT ecosystem.

The dynamic NFTs will evolve based on the decisions and engagement of the owner, according to an announcement on April 11 which described the collection as the “first step” towards owning an “ALTS by Adidas” identity.

The floor price of each Adidas NFT is 0.666 Ether (ETH) ($1,275) and has raked in 351 ETH ($672,000) in trading volume so far. There are now 8,989 owners, 56% of them unique.

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There are 16,000 items in total and the creators taking a 10% cut of each sale.

The ALTS by adidas” NFTs are selling for a minimum of around 0.66 ETH. Source: OpenSea

Collectors must buy and burn Phase 1 and 2 of Adidas' "Into the Metaverse" tokens in order to receive the ALTS by Adidas NFT.

Be nonfungible, my friend: Bruce Lee enters Web3

A NFT collection commemorating the late Kung-Fu fighter and movie star, Bruce “Little Dragon” Lee, has been released by the Bruce Lee Estate in partnership with Shibuya, an NFT-driven video platform.

Plans for the release were revealed on April 11 when Lee's Twitter account, managed by his family, shared an old video clip of Lee, which then transformed him into an animated version of himself.

The NFTs sold at a starting price of 0.008 ETH, or $15, and 13,907 were minted in the first 24 hours, totaling over $205,000 according to its smart contract address on Etherscan.

The NFTs were drawn by artist Emily “pplpleasr” Yang and were designed by Shannon Lee — Bruce Lee’s daughter.

Cover album of “House of Lee: Genesis” NFT. Source: Manifold

Despite it being an “open edition” collection, collectors can only mint a maximum of 100 of the NFTs.

Other Nifty News

NFT marketplace OpenSea launched “OpenSea Pro” last week, a new, specialized NFT marketplace aggregator aimed at serving the needs of professional NFT traders. The service was made possible by OpenSea’s acquisition of fellow NFT aggregator, Gem, in April 2022.

An NFT trader fat-fingered a bid for a free NFT buying it at 100 Ether ($191,000). The token was part of NFT marketplace OpenSea’s Gemesis NFT collection to commemorate the launch of OpenSea Pro on April 4. Some believe the trader meant to bid the token for $100 instead.

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Bitcoin Ordinals community debates fix after inscription validation bug

Currently, over two-thirds of voters on a Twitter poll said the missed inscriptions should be added at a later date instead of there being a retroactive reshuffling.

A few solutions are being discussed to fix a code bug found in the Bitcoin (BTC)-native Ordinals protocol which has prevented over 1,200 inscriptions from being validated.

While nearly every member of the Ordinals community agrees that these inscription requests should be reincluded, the community is debating whether they should be added retroactively or not.

The bug came from the indexer function of the protocol only counting inscriptions that were in the first input of a transaction submitted up to and including version 0.5.1 of the protocol.

One prominent Ordinals member known on Twitter as “Leonidas.og” summarized the pros and cons of each solution in an April 10 tweet, coming a few days after the issue was first made public on April 5 by the GitHub user “veryordinally.”

The first solution involves selecting a block height to retroactively index the so-called “orphan” inscriptions from inscription number 420,285 onwards, which is roughly where the first orphan inscription was identified.

“This feels like the ‘purist’ solution because it means the ordinals protocol would correctly match the logical ordering on-chain,” Leonidas.og explained, despite acknowledging that the reshuffling “may cause other complications.”

The alternative is to not change inscription numbers that have already been validated and to pick a block height to add these orphan inscriptions in at some time in the future, Leonidas.og explained:

“This would not change any existing inscription numbers so the ~1,200 orphans would not be assigned inscription numbers officially in the protocol. It would be up to the market to value them as 'misprints' or not.”

Another Ordinals GitHub community member, “Yilak” argued in favor of not changing up the order because only a fraction of inscription owners have been impacted.

Related: Bitcoin Ordinals daily inscriptions surge due to ‘BRC-20 tokens’

At the time of writing, 67.5% of 1,266 voters are in favor of not changing the inscription numbers according to a Twitter poll created by Leonidas.og.

On April 8, the number of Bitcoin Ordinals inscriptions surpassed 1 million according to data from the crypto analytics platform Dune. It came just days after daily new inscriptions hit a record of over 76,300 on April 4.

Ordinals are considered to be digital artifacts on the Bitcoin network, similar to that of nonfungible tokens (NFTs) and can compromise of images, PDFs, video or audio formats.

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Bitcoin Ordinals daily inscriptions surge due to ‘BRC-20 tokens’

The BRC-20 token standard utilizes Ordinal inscriptions to deploy token contracts, mint tokens and transfer tokens.

A new daily all-time high has been recorded for the number of Ordinals inscribed on the Bitcoin (BTC) network due to a recently launched “token standard” for the blockchain.

Bitcoin Ordinals reached 58,179 inscriptions on April 2, smashing the previous all-time high of 31,692 on March 9 by 83.5%, according to Dune Analytics data.

The surge is believed to be driven by the recent creation of “Bitcoin Request for Comment” (BRC-20) tokens on the Ordinals protocol by a pseudonymous on-chain analyst named Domo in early March.

Daily count of Ordinals inscriptions shown in green. Source: Dune Analytics

While Ordinals are nonfungible token (NFT)-like “digital artifacts” which carry data in the form of text, JPEG images, PDFs, video and audio formats on the Bitcoin network, the BRC-20 token standard utilizes Ordinal inscriptions to deploy token contracts, mint tokens, and transfer tokens — similar to Ethereum’s ERC-20 token standard.

The arrival of Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens on Bitcoin were enabled by the Taproot soft fork, which took effect on Nov. 14, 2021.

Over 55,000 of the inscriptions on April 2 came in the form of text-based Ordinals, many of which were represented by BRC-20 tokens, according to “Leonidis.og,” the host of an Ordinals-focused podcast.

BRC-20 tokens — which are categorized as text-based Ordinals — are the most commonly inscribed Ordinal on Bitcoin. Source: Dune Analytics.

Leonidis explained in a tweet that the spike on April 2 came on the back of new tools used to interact with BRC-20 tokens launched in the last few days.

“There was a lot of excitement around BRC-20 when it launched a month ago but eventually the hyped died down. During the lull, devs built tools to make interacting with BRC-20 much easier and now we're seeing ATH interest. I've said it before and I will say it again. UX matters!”

Among those new tools include Ord.io, UniSat Wallet and BRC-20.io. According to BRC-20.io, 1,600 tokens have been created since the BRC-20 standard was created.

Among the most popular BRC-20 tokens include “pepe,” “ordi,” and “punk,” currently boasting respective market caps of $2.5 million, $2.1 million and $900,000.

Related: Bitcoin Ordinals creator looks for fix after first instance of shock porn

Over 42,700 BRC–20 tokens have been minted in the last 24 hours, mostly coming from the tokens wzrd, domo, BAYC, meme and pups.

Bitcoin tokens, through the BRC-20 standard, can now be bought and sold on marketplaces, similar to Ethereum ERC-20 tokens. Source: BRC-20.io

While the market cap of BRC-20 tokens currently sits at less than $10 million, digital asset investment firm Galaxy Digital believes the “Bitcoin NFT” market may reach $4.5 billion by 2025.

Members of the Bitcoin community are still split on whether Ordinals is a good fit for the Bitcoin ecosystem. Proponents such as Dan Held suggest it offers more financial use cases on Bitcoin, while others say it’s straying away from Satoshi Nakamoto’s vision of Bitcoin as a peer-to-peer cash system.

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Ordinals protocol sparks debate over NFT’s place in the Bitcoin ecosystem

The community has been divided as to whether the NFT-like "digital artifacts" are the right fit for the Bitcoin ecosystem.

The recent launch of a nonfungible token (NFT) protocol on the Bitcoin mainnet has the crypto community divided over whether it’ll be good for the Bitcoin ecosystem. 

The protocol, referred to as “Ordinals,” was created by software engineer Casey Rodarmor, who officially launched the program on the Bitcoin mainnet following a Jan. 21 blog post.

The protocol essentially allows for the Bitcoin version of NFTs — described as “digital artifacts” on the Bitcoin network.

These “digital artificats” can comprise of JPEG-like images, PDFs, video and audio formats.

Meme-inspired, NFT-like “digital artifacts” are now being inscripted on the Bitcoin network. Source: Ordinals.

The introduction of the protocol has the Bitcoin community divided however, with some arguing that it would offer more financial use cases for Bitcoin, while others say its straying away from Satoshi Nakamoto’s vision of Bitcoin as a peer-to-peer cash system.

Bitcoin bull Dan Held was one of those on board with the development, noting that it would drive demand for block space, and thus fees, while bringing more use cases to Bitcoin.

Some have pointed out that these NFT-like structures have taken up block space on the Bitcoin network, which could drive up transaction fees.

Among those include “Bitcoin is Saving” on Twitter, suggesting to its 237,600 followers on Jan. 29 that “privileged wealthy white” people’s desire to put JPEGs as status symbols may exclude marginalized people from participating in the Bitcoin network.

Cryptocurrency researcher Eric Wall disagreed with the opinion that the in-built block size limit will prevent a rise in transaction fees.

Others, such as Blockstream CEO and Bitcoin core developer Adam Back wasn’t happy with meme culture being brought to Bitcoin, who suggested the developers to take the “stupidity” elsewhere:

However, Ethereum bull and host of The Daily Gwei Anthony Sassano took a shot at the Blockstream CEO for wanting “undesirable” transactions to be censored — which many believe goes against the ethos of Bitcoin:

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In a blog post, Rodarmor explained that the NFT-like structures are created by inscribing satoshis — the native currency of the Bitcoin network — with arbitrary content.

These inscribed satoshis — which are cryptographically represented by a string of numbers — can then be secured or transferred to other Bitcoin addresses, according to notes in Ordinal’s technical documentation:

“Inscribing is done by sending the satoshi to be inscribed in a transaction that reveals the inscription content on-chain. This content is then inextricably linked to that satoshi, turning it into an immutable digital artifact that can be tracked, transferred, hoarded, bought, sold, lost, and rediscovered.”

The inscriptions take place on the Bitcoin mainnet, no sidechain or separate token is needed, the document states.

It appears that only 277 digital artifacts have been inscripted thus far, according to the Ordinals website.

Interestingly, Rodarmor — admitted in an Aug. 25 interview on Hell Money Podcast that Ordinals was created to bring memes to life on Bitcoin:

“This is 100% a meme-driven development.”

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