[Daily] The extraordinary Ordinals

Good morning! Welcome to The Daily Moon. It’s a brand new week. The list of gaming legends being attracted by crypto went up by one. The founder of Electronic Arts has joined a gaming company and will be building games based on NFTs and the blockchain. Welcome aboard!

Moving on, today we talk about why Bitcoin inscriptions are important and Solana’s outage troubles.

As of Sunday, 4pm IST

The markets stayed cautious. Bitcoin gained marginally after losing a support level at $23,739. Ethereum gained in the build-up to the Shanghai upgrade. S&P 500 and Nasdaq fell on fears of aggressive rate hikes. Back home, Sensex and Nifty ended lower as auto and metal stocks tanked.

Not Just Ordinal-y

“Bitcoin is so boring”. That’s what Casey Rodarmor’s friends often told him. There weren't too many use cases for the crypto and that’s something that bothered Casey. So, he set out to make Bitcoin a “fun” blockchain.

Enter OrdinalsIf you look at Cardano, Ethereum, or Polygon, there is so much to do. You have payments, DeFi, dApps, and NFTs. Bitcoin had one. Casey changed that in January 2023. He brought an NFT project called Ordinals into the Bitcoin blockchain. Just that, he called it Inscriptions instead of NFTs.

Inscriptions are similar to NFTs, but are inscribed on satoshi, the lowest denomination of Bitcoin. Just like NFTs, Inscriptions can have artwork, text, music, and videos. The only difference is that these Bitcoin NFTs have the entire dataset within the blockchain.

Why is it a big deal?Bitcoin needed to get bigger. Not the price per se, but the network as a whole. Ordinals has managed to get the wheels moving. Since its launch, ~168,000 Inscriptions have been created on Bitcoin. It is likely to kickstart development activity on Bitcoin:

1. NFTs will bring more users to the network.

2. If there can be NFTs, why not other decentralised apps?

3. It’ll build a safe space to scale crypto projects.

The SEC has cracked down on crypto but Bitcoin seems untouched so far. So if Bitcoin is not a security, projects in the blockchain may escape regulatory scrutiny.

FYI Ordinals isn’t the first NFT project on Bitcoin. In 2012, Bitcoin had a project called Colored Coins that was a precursor to the Ethereum NFTs.

Bitcoin and more…There’s an expectation that Ordinals will take up block space, increase network activity, and eventually make Bitcoin more valuable. We don’t know to what extent but the change has begun. Bitcoin topped $25,000 amidst the Ordinals buzz.

Casey’s also okay with “Monkey JPEGs” (you know which ones those are) as long as the Bitcoin network’s utility goes up. If network activity goes up, more developers come in and then it brings more fees. You get the picture.

Now, the Ordinals project has expanded. Litecoin got its first Inscription after a fork on the Bitcoin version. Btw, it was the first-ever NFT on Litecoin, if we call it that. That gives the Litecoin blockchain an opportunity to go beyond just payments. More use-cases = better value for the token.

ICYMI An NFT protocol has also adopted Ordinals into Ethereum and named it “Ordinary Oranges”. Not sure why ETH needed it, but it’s a sign that people are hooked.

Naysayers are quietWhen Ordinals launched, Bitcoiners were understandably angry. NFTs were contrary to Satoshi Nakamoto’s vision of making Bitcoin a peer-to-peer electronic cash network. Plus, there were concerns of a network slowdown triggered by Ordinals. Some even called it a waste of precious block space. But, none of that has really happened. In fact, Bitcoin has grown 5% ever since Ordinals’ debut.

Another Solana Outage

Solana users woke up on Sunday morning to realise that the entire network was done. Not a single transaction was going through. This is now in another series of outages on the once celebrated network.

Stories filtered out that this outage was part of a long fork event. A restart was supposed to unveil to the world a new Solana.

SighSolana has been suffering for the past few months. Not only with various outages but with projects leaving its network and the token being on a free fall since the FTX disaster. It saw a few days of positive movement in the price but that corrected itself soon after. Nothing is working for the once famous Sol.

It could get worse for Sol when FTX is forced to sell all its crypto to repay its customers.

There’s a ray of sunshine

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