BitMEX founder and American crypto billionaire Arthur Hayes joined anonymous developer Domo, creator of the Bitcoin BRC-20 token standard, in a $3 million pre-seed funding round for Bitcoin Ordinals wallet Oyl.
Crypto asset manager Arca led the round. Other backers include Kanosei and FlamingoDAO.
On launching in the coming weeks, Oyl will offer “in-wallet” Ordinals trading. Ordinals brings NFT functionality to Bitcoin by enabling data inscriptions on individual satoshis. Satoshis are the smaller unit of Bitcoin, like cents are to a dollar.
All kinds of data can go on satoshis, including image, video, audio, and even a very primitive DOOM clone.
Following on from the Ordinals breakthrough, Domo’s BRC-20 token standard brought the ability to create tokens by inscribing data on satoshis.
Similar to the ERC-20 standard used on Ethereum by heavyweights like Tether, Uniswap, Polygon, Chainlink and Shiba Inu, BRC-20 lacks one crucial function of its counterpart: high-functionality smart contracts.
Still, for something that was put out for free by its creator, it’s gaining considerable traction and interest, a testament to the benefits of open-source collaboration, a founding ethos of crypto.
Bitcoin Ordinals And Beyond
Ordinals may become even more important in the Bitcoin network’s post-halving economy. On the halving, which is a quadrennial event that is this year estimated to arrive on April 19, the block rewards for Bitcoin miners get cut by half.
This effectively halves both mining revenues and the issuance of new Bitcoin. Typically, when demand has stayed consistent, as it has through the last three halvings, the price tends to go higher.
This halving looks no different with very high institutional demand for Bitcoin after the January launch of eleven Bitcoin ETFs. The world’s favourite cryptocurrency set a new all-time high of $69,255.77 just an hour ago, according to CoinGecko, but it has since pulled back to trade at $67,962.06 as of this writing.
Still, Ordinals transaction fees will represent an important alternative revenue stream for miners. They currently account for about 20% of miners revenue.
In the early days of March 2024, Bitcoin NFTs posted $168.5 million in sales over a period of seven days. They beat Ethereum NFTs, which posted $162 million over the same period.
Outside of Ordinals, Bitcoin nowadays has a booming layer 2 network, helping the blockchain to achieve scale and speed across a variety of applications. These layer 2s help give Bitcoin the functionality of Ethereum, the most commercially important blockchain.