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👀 Don't fade Ordinals

👀 Don't fade Ordinals

PLUS: The 2nd biggest bank failure in history

Alex M.
May 01, 2023

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GM everyone. This is 2036, the newsletter that makes you smarter on crypto in 3min/day.

First Republic Bank collapsed over the weekend and was sold to JP Morgan today. It’s the 2nd largest bank failure in US history.

But in the crypto world, a new trend that’s been exploding since January reached an all-time high yesterday.

As always, we’ve got you covered.

So what’s going on?

Let’s find out.

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We’ve written about Ordinals multiple times this year - the bitcoin protocol used to create bitcoin NFTs.

In fact, we first covered them when less than 10,000 were created per day.

But yesterday, over 307,000 were created - 30X more than when we first wrote about it.

We hope some of you made $$ from that 🫡.

Originally bitcoin NFTs were just satoshis (1 millionth of a bitcoin) inscribed with an image or video.

They were used to transfer ownership of digital assets that were unique, i.e. not fungible.

These are similar to your classic NFTs on Ethereum. And most of the biggest collections of bitcoin NFTs are still copies of the Ethereum OGs:

But for the last month or so, 99% of all inscriptions have been text-based.

A developer found a way to create text-based fungible tokens on the bitcoin blockchain i.e. tokens that are identical and interchangeable, like ETH or SOL.

The process is pretty straightforward. You inscribe a token on the bitcoin blockchain with instructions like this:

Yeah, I know.

The above inscription just says:

use the BRC-20 protocol to deploy (create) a token called ordi with a cap of 21,000,000 tokens, limiting the amount of ordis that can be minted in one transaction to 1,000.

Translation of the inscription above

This is similar to other tokens that are built on top of Ethereum, called ERC-20 tokens, like Polygon ($MATIC), Shiba Inu ($SHIB), Uniswap ($UNI), Sandbox ($SAND), etc.

This process is very common on the Ethereum blockchain. It’s now moving to the bitcoin blockchain.

Okay, so how can you use this information?

There are already around 7,500 different tokens on bitcoin, with a total market cap of around $1.5 BILLION.

For comparison, there are roughly 400,000 tokens on Ethereum.

And the majority of tokens minted so far on the bitcoin blockchain are memecoins.

We talked about those in depth last week, when one memecoin on Ethereum skyrocketed 3,900,000% in 4 days.

Memecoins are mostly gambles and for fun.

But if you wanted to play around in the bitcoin space, you could:

A) check out the biggest bitcoin BRC-20 collections:

To make it simple for you, these are -

ordi
meme
punk
pepe

If you’re really brave, you can buy these on the Unisat marketplace. But these aren’t exactly easy (or great) things to buy. This will change soon (and we’ll update you when it does, of course!).

So in the meantime, you can also…

B) Check out the biggest NFT collections on bitcoin

Remember, if crypto is the wild west of finance and NFTs are the wild west of crypto, bitcoin NFTs are the wild west of NFTs.

Jim West, desperado
Rough rider, no you don't want nada

Bitcoin NFTs are new, and still very risky. They’re probably closer to a gamble than anything else.

But if you’ve got the stomach for it, you can browse Bitcoin NFTs on Ordinals or Magic Eden. Just create a wallet, fund it, browse around and voila.

So go easy and only play around with what you can afford to lose. But it looks like bitcoin NFTs and tokens are here to stay.

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