The carving is of blue eyes, consisting of 99 PFPs carved on Block 78 (“Hal Finney”) sats. The green eyes were carved last, with a total of 1900 PFPs carved on Block 9 sats.
Among all the Ordinals series, OMB is one of the lowest-priced (0.76 BTC/$38,000) and highest-selling. After the hype of Ordinals last November, the prices of many other series have decreased, but OMB’s price has continued to rise steadily.
It is worth noting that over 3000 new OMBs with orange eye features were carved on Bitcoin during the 2024 Super Bowl, with some inscriptions appearing on some of the oldest Bitcoin sats. These products have not been released yet, so it is worth paying close attention to related announcements.
The project describes itself as a movement with some similarities to Goblintown in fostering a dedicated community. Serious OMB collectors believe that these PFPs are not just derivatives of punk, but thoughtful works of art that support important political statements. For example, graffiti featuring OMB has appeared on the streets of London, advocating “Buy Bitcoin, Free Ross” as a symbol of protest against the authorities. Collecting OMB can be a form of support for this movement.
In addition, OMB is partnering with Luxor Technologies to allocate funds for Bitcoin mining. The proceeds will be used to maintain a treasury and fund OBounties, rewarding developers, educators, and community members who contribute to open source projects that align with Bitcoin’s core values. Education bonuses will be specifically awarded to OMB holders based on effort and engagement. Holders are also encouraged to propose bounties for consideration.
Interestingly, OMB does not have a Discord server, and all community coordination is done on Twitter.
Pizza Ninjas, launched by the team behind Ninjalerts, is a blockchain data insights tool for web and mobile applications that sends real-time push notifications for NFT-related activities. Founder Trevor is a well-known investor and influencer in the Bitcoin space and operates a popular Twitter Space show.
The Pizza Ninjas series consists of 1500 PFPs carved on rare pizza sats and was launched on January 17th with a mint price of 0.03 BTC. Notably, it is the first Ordinals PFP series with a high resolution of 2000×2000 pixels, utilizing recursion and dynamic features that vary based on Bitcoin block height. We love that it is a thoughtfully designed PFP series, detailed in their design whitepaper.
Each Ninja PFP serves as an interactive application, offering built-in animation editors, one-click social media stickers, and an on-chain Super Nintendo emulator for in-PFP gaming.
Owning a Pizza Ninja PFP grants a lifetime license to Ninjalerts’ Ordinal Portfolio Tracker and Wallet Viewer software. Additionally, the PFPs act as membership passes to their alpha group, providing collaboration and perks list for top projects.
Despite offering rich functionality, the initial price of Pizza Ninja has decreased since its launch and is currently hovering around 0.05 BTC (a 66% increase compared to the mint price). The project’s long-term goal is to become a world-class Bitcoin-native IP—a ambitious vision that requires significant time and effort to achieve.
Catalyst for 2024:
Ordinals enters a frenzy bull market. This has fueled the demand for the Ninjalerts product suite, as it facilitates early mint sniping and tracking the launch of new projects. Pizza Ninjas serves as a gateway to accessing this product suite.
Collaborations and Partnerships:
Bitcoin Art:
In our conversations, many artists have observed the Ordinals space with keen interest. The appeal lies not only in the art itself but also in the innovative processes behind it, such as recursion techniques and recombination of existing artworks. Ordinals art is also fully on-chain, setting it apart from most NFTs. This environment echoes the early explorations of digital art on Ethereum, where boundaries were constantly tested and expanded.
A notable example of creative use comes from artist SpZjulien, who carved personal piano audio files onto Bitcoin. This approach allows for fully on-chain songs to be created through recursive inscriptions, showcasing the immense potential of Bitcoin on-chain art composability.
However, Ordinals poses unique challenges for artists, particularly in terms of file size limitations that directly affect the feasibility of creating and trading high-quality, complex art. For example, the cost of carving a 1MB AI-generated image on Ordinals could be thousands of dollars, positioning such works as symbols of exclusivity for the wealthy rather than accessible art forms.
The limitations imposed by Ordinals have led to a surge in raster art (pixel-based) or costly alternatives to complex vector inscriptions, prompting artists and collectors to seek lower-cost alternatives. However, there is a belief emerging that early high-quality raster art may become highly valuable due to its rarity.
One creative solution to address these limitations is the use of recursion in generative art on Ordinals. Artists carve a core script, and subsequent artworks use it as a base, adding unique data to generate different outputs. This approach significantly reduces the size and cost of each inscription.
Despite these innovations, discoverability remains a challenge in the generative art space, highlighting the need for improved platforms to showcase and promote Ordinals art.
Harto’s FloraForms:
FloraForms is a collection of 10,000 fully on-chain generative art pieces created by artist Harto in collaboration with the Vienna Leopold Museum. It takes inspiration from Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss,” which is said to be similar to generative art. It was launched for free on February 14th (only inscription fees apply) and currently has a floor price of 0.003 BTC ($150).
The collection uses parent-child provenance, allowing for clear origins of on-chain collections. This benefits collectors, future dapps, markets, wallets, and explorers without the need for off-chain references. The generative collection uses recursive inscriptions, with each artwork downloading over 2MB but the inscriptions being only 160 bytes. The parent recursive inscriptions are also created efficiently through compression, totaling only 12KB.
Harto’s Golden Ratio:
Another highly sought-after Ordinals art collection in recent weeks is Harto’s Golden Ratio, curated by VIVID Gallery. The project offers 420 free mints and currently has a floor price of 0.1 BTC ($5,200). It may be one of the most intriguing generative art pieces on Bitcoin today.
Harto’s series combines the Fibonacci sequence with recursive algorithms and fractal geometry, showcasing the harmony between numbers and nature. Inspired by cosmic symmetry and chaos theory, each artwork displays the beauty of randomness and order. The aesthetics of this series draw heavily from cryptography and the Bauhaus movement.
Golden Ratio stands out for being both “recursive” and “scripted.” Recursive inscriptions can reference data from other inscriptions. Due to its recursive nature, it can be seen as the “Holy Grail” of recursive collections, perfectly embodying the golden ratio, a symbol of natural proportion.
The “scripted” inscriptions are an important moment in Ordinals history, previously overlooked by the Ordinals indexer, resulting in negative numbers. This issue has since been fixed through updates. Scripted inscriptions like the golden ratio may hold a special place in the origin of the evolving Bitcoin art culture movement.
0xfar’s FLARES:
0xfar is known for being the artist behind Taproot Wizards and Quantum Cats, two of the most popular Ordinals projects. In February 2024, he launched FLARES, a generative art collection within the PARALLAX series consisting of 512 pieces.
FLARES explores world-building, terraforming, and atmospheric elements with 21 different types, each with distinct dynamic appearances. It is created using algorithms in Three.js. It made its debut on Gamma through a Dutch auction and quickly sold out with a base mint price of 0.015 BTC.
More OG crypto artists have been experimenting on Ordinals and releasing some of their works. Examples include:
– “The Origin” by Dutch-Canadian artist Ryan Coopman
– Jack Butcher, known for his Check and Openen series on Ethereum, placed a series of 100 Ordinals checks on Bitcoin as digital artifacts.
– Rare Scrilla, a rare Pepe artist, created artworks on Ordinals.
Another challenge for Bitcoin art is that it is currently fragmented, lacking a platform or community that convincingly becomes the “Art Blocks” of Ordinals. This makes it harder for collectors to discover the artworks they like.
Auctions at Sotheby’s:
Sotheby’s has successfully held two Bitcoin Ordinals auctions in the past three months, indicating strong demand for Ordinals artworks. The first was a series of three BitcoinShrooms that pixelatedly revisited the first 13 years of Bitcoin and paid homage to eight art styles. They are among the earliest Ordinals, with fewer than 1,000 inscriptions.
After the initial success, Sotheby’s auctioned a series of artworks and rare sats, all of which were sold out, often at prices far exceeding their estimated values. The total sales reached $2.4 million, demonstrating the strong interest in Ordinals art.
A closer look at the auction results reveals some interesting trends in the valuation of these digital artifacts:
– Artworks with lower inscription numbers are highly sought after, especially those with numbers below 100. For example, an artwork simply inscribed as “Inscription 21” achieved a price of 101,00.The astonishing price of 0 dollars is mainly due to its early origins. Even art pieces with a large number of inscriptions can fetch a considerable price. Genesis Cat is the most expensive ordinal sold by Sotheby’s to date, with a price of $254,000. Despite having over 54 million inscriptions, its value still depends on its uniqueness as a one-of-a-kind piece in the Quantum Cat series.
In conclusion, blockchain art is still in its early stages. The unique properties of Bitcoin provide a fertile ground for artists and collectors to explore and redefine the boundaries of digital art.
Bitcoin Origin Protocol
“Origin Protocol” is a loosely defined term referring to protocols and token standards built on top of inscriptions. Various meta-protocols such as BRC-420, ORC-20, and BRC-69 have been introduced, but all except for BRC-20 are striving to gain significant traction. The release of Ord v1.0 marks an important milestone as it incorporates formal meta-protocol fields into inscriptions envelopes. This innovation simplifies the indexing process, allowing for more efficient identification of specific meta-protocols without having to individually check each inscription.
Our research team’s Aaron provides a more detailed explanation of this in his Alpha Feed post.
Examples of meta-protocols include:
BRC-420: Developed by the Merlin Chain team, BRC-420 introduces the concept of “royalties” to inscriptions. Interestingly, the highest-priced BRC-420 is the Blue Box, a 10K collectible with a starting price of 0.5 BTC.
BRC-1024: Aimed at facilitating the creation of new meta-universes on Bitcoin, BRC-1024 emphasizes metadata. This metadata provides detailed descriptions of virtual objects stored as text-based artifacts on the Bitcoin blockchain. More information can be found on their website.
BRC-100: BRC-100 expands the utility of the BRC-20 protocol by adding computational capabilities and state to tokens. This includes features such as lending pools, airdrops, decentralized stablecoins, and governance protocols, and all BRC-100 extensions are interoperable across applications. More information can be found in their documentation: https://docs.brc100.org/
Each meta-protocol is developing its own ecosystem, but currently, they are still in the early stages, and practical applications and usage are limited. Apart from Runes and BRC-20, one such standard and community worth noting is the Trac Network.
Trac Network and Tap Protocol
Trac Network represents a comprehensive ecosystem consisting of protocols and products, all stemming from the community rooted in the BRC-20 standard (TRAC, with a market value of approximately $100 million) and led by the anonymous Bennythedev.
Trac Core is the first product in the Trac Network, aiming to decentralize control over the Ordinals protocol by providing decentralized indexers and oracles managed by TRAC holders. The functionality of Ordinals and BRC20 heavily relies on indexers, with ord v0.9 being the primary indexer. However, the introduction of ord v1.0 disrupted BRC20, leading many to stick to previous versions, highlighting the importance and challenges of indexers.
Tap Protocol is the second product in the Trac Network. The protocol introduces the TAP token standard, aiming to simplify complex financial transactions within the Ordinals ecosystem without the need for layer 2 solutions. Its unique “eavesdropping” feature ensures transaction validation, thereby enhancing flexibility and practicality.
Tap Protocol has also successfully raised $4.2 million in funding, led by Sora Ventures.
The TAP protocol supports:
Exchange and staking: Facilitating the exchange and staking of assets.
Liquidity pools: Supporting the creation of decentralized trading pools.
Token verification: Allowing for the verification of tokens within the platform, which can be used as currency or items in games.
TAP Art: Linking Ordinals with the TAP protocol token to enable fractional ownership of valuable artworks. This extension ensures the maintenance of the deployment source and ownership of the ordinal.
Multi-send feature: Providing users with the ability to perform multiple transactions simultaneously, simplifying the distribution of airdropped tokens.
Multi-asset protocol: Supporting multiple asset types beyond a single standard on the Bitcoin blockchain. It also introduces a new type of token called “non-arbitrary tokens” or NAT.
GeniiData’s analysis shows that, among the meta-protocols other than BRC-20 and standard Ordinals, the majority of inscriptions minted daily are related to Tap. We also want to highlight the Trac & Tap protocol as several airdrops are taking place:
Tap: The Tap protocol will launch its token TAP through two airdrops. The original ecosystem token TRAC will receive 80% of the airdrop allocation, while PIPE will receive 20%. Holders who retain tokens between snapshots will receive an additional 50% boost in their airdrop allocation.
The first snapshot is scheduled for February 28th, with the airdrop being distributed proportionally upon the listing of TAP tokens. The second snapshot is planned for the second quarter of 2024, distributing a second batch of TAP airdrops to TRAC and PIPE holders.
KARMA: KARMA is the token of the OnChainMonkey community, a prominent NFT PFP community on Ethereum that is currently transitioning to Bitcoin. It is yet to be determined what utility the token will have. It is the community’s decision to support TRAC and commit to being validators in the decentralized sorter. It is currently in the process of being released:
70% of KARMA tokens will be airdropped to OnChainMonkey NFT holders, TRAC, and PIPE token holders.
20% will be allocated for token swaps with TRAC. It was fully distributed and completed on February 20th, with tokens becoming available on February 26th.
10% will be deposited into the community treasury.
Liquidium: NFTfi on Bitcoin
Liquidium is a peer-to-peer lending protocol specifically tailored for Bitcoin, utilizing Bitcoin-based assets such as ordinal inscriptions and BRC-20 tokens as collateral. This innovative approach is achieved through Partially Signed Bitcoin Transactions (PSBT) and Discreet Log Contracts (DLC), all executed on the Bitcoin network itself.
Similar to P2P lending platforms on Ethereum, borrowers can flexibly collateralize their assets based on their own deemed conditions, while lenders can choose to provide loans based on their risk preferences and terms. The platform’s lending interest rate is 20%.
Liquidium supports various popular collections on Ordinals, including Nodemonkes, Bitcoin Frogs, and OMB. Lenders have the opportunity to earn competitive yields through BTC, with loan interest rates ranging from 65% to 100%.
Since its inception, Liquidium has facilitated a total transaction volume of over 201.5 BTC (approximately $10.49 million) for 4,492 completed and active loans. Importantly, there is a clear upward trend in daily loans, indicating increasing demand. A loyalty program is currently underway, allowing users to earn points by participating in lending activities on the platform.
BitSmiley – MakerDAO for Bitcoin
BitSmiley is a Bitcoin DeFi protocol that encompasses three DeFi verticals: stablecoins, lending, and derivatives. The protocol allows for the minting of a stablecoin called bitUSD (based on the bitRC-20 standard), which introduces the first native stablecoin backed directly by BTC in Bitcoin. The bitRC-20 standard provides stronger functionality to support the operations of bitUSD compared to typical BRC-20 standards. To mint more bitUSD, users must collateralize BTC, similar to other collateralized stablecoins like DAI on Ethereum.
In addition to stablecoins, the protocol is also aimed at introducing:
BitLending, a Bitcoin-native P2P lending protocol.
Credit Default Swaps (CDS) that allow bundling loans and assessing credit defaults based on different default rates.
In the coming years, as the number of inscriptions reaches billions, Holy Grail collectors may be attracted to early digital inscriptions for their historical origins. While a significant portion of inscriptions below 10K consists of single random images, there are some more cohesive collections within these early inscriptions that may interest collectors.
These include (but are not limited to):
Ordinal Punks: 100 Ordinal PFPs engraved within the first 650 Ordinals inscriptions.
Bitcoin Shrooms: 210 pixelated mushroom artworks engraved within the first 1,075 Ordinals inscriptions.
The Fiat Collection: The earliest Ordinals series engraved on Bitcoin within the first 117 ordinal inscriptions.
Inscribed Pepes: A collection of the first 69 1/1 “Pepe the Frog” within the first batch of 2,189 Ordinals inscriptions.
Planetary Ordinals: 68 chain art collections engraved within the 1,103rd Ordinals inscription.
Taproot Wizards: 2625th Ordinals PFP inscription led by Udi Wertheimer within the first 2,121 Ordinals inscriptions.
Timechain Collection: 21 Ordinals timepiece artifacts engraved within the first 377 Ordinals inscriptions.
To illustrate our point, Inscription #2 depicting a dancing bird was sold for a staggering price of up to 24.48 BTC (approximately $1.4 million) on February 28th, setting the record for the most expensive Ordinals inscription sold to date. It highlights the presence of serious collectors who are willing to invest a considerable amount to own a piece of early Ordinals history. Looking ahead, it can be imagined that modern art museums may start acquiring and exhibiting Bitcoin digital artifacts with significant cultural and historical value.
The complete list of collections below 10k Ordinals can be found here. Additionally, our previous coverage on Ordinal Punks, Bitcoin Shrooms, and Taproot Wizards can be found here.
Conclusion
Now is an exciting time to explore Bitcoin. While Bitcoin holds a trillion-dollar asset status, much of its capital has remained passive until recently. However, more and more users are actively engaging in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Ordinals have kicked off a wave of development on a blockchain that has largely been dormant. Today, Bitcoin’s landscape is vibrant and diverse, filled with meme coins, digital art, profile pictures (PFPs), layer 2 solutions, and DeFi products. It feels reminiscent of the explosive growth Ethereum experienced from 2020 to 2021.
Bitcoin continues to garner attention, and its ongoing development will remain a focal point in the news. Builders unite in pursuit of sustainable transaction fees for Bitcoin. The launch of Runes during the Bitcoin halving period in April will be a key event to watch.
There is no doubt that 2024 will be an important year for the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Tags:
Avalanche
Delphi Digital
Fantom
NFT
Polygon
Rune
UTXO
WIZARD
Bitcoin
Source link:
https://www.techflowpost.com/article/detail_17142.html
Disclaimer: The views expressed in all articles by Bitpush News are solely the author’s and do not constitute investment advice.
Original link:
https://www.bitpush.news/articles/6558676
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