With the number of bitcoin-based Ordinal inscriptions approaching 300,000, Galaxy Digital’s research team has released a report indicating that the market for bitcoin-built Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT) The Galaxy researchers believe that new use cases stemming from the inscription trend will “drive increased interest and adoption” for bitcoin.
Galaxy researchers explore potential use cases for bitcoin-based ordinal inscriptions and NFTs
At the time of this writing, there are more than288,000 Ordinal inscriptions hosted on the Bitcoin blockchain, as the trend has ballooned significantly since its inception in February 2023.Four days ago, the Ordinal inscriptions number reached 200,000, and on the same day, Yuga Labs, creator of the Ethereum NFT collection Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), revealed that it had minted a collection of 300 inscriptions for auction of the pieces. six researchers and an executive at Galaxy Digital executives released areporton the subject, assessing that bitcoin NFTs “built with inscriptions [and] ordinals” could reach $4.5 billion by 2025.
The Galaxy report stated that “Inscription greatly expands the bitcoin design space. “Many of the new types of decentralized software and bitcoin scaling techniques, many of which are just beginning to be explored, will open up a variety of use cases by adding large-scale data storage that guarantees strong availability. However, the NFT use case alone has the potential to dramatically expand the scope of Bitcoin’s cultural impact.”
Galaxy researchers emphasize that the ecosystem is still very young, but note that “infrastructure is emerging rapidly.” According to the Galaxy paper on inscription, one of the key building blocks of the technology will be the wallet. It also delves into the various collections that have been minted recently, including Taproot Wizards, Bitcoin Punks, and Ord Rocks. The paper mentions the marketplace Openordex, which “leverages Partially Signed Bitcoin Transactions (PSBT) to allow for the unreliable listing and purchase of inscriptions.” Additionally, the Galaxy researcher mentions the controversy tied to Ordinal inscriptions.
The researcher believes that the technical debate has already been largely avoided and that a social movement to block Ordinal inscriptions will probably not happen.” After all, we see the technical arguments against inscriptions as already largely mitigated, since enabling assetvalid=1 prunes witness data in the initial block download (IBD) and avoids old data.” Galaxy researchers write.” On the narrative side, Ordinal inscription transactions are valid for all nodes in the bitcoin network today. Social movements that make changes to bitcoin are o