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What do Ordinal Inscriptions Mean for the Future of Bitcoin?

What do Ordinal Inscriptions Mean for the Future of Bitcoin?

A great deal of buzz has been generated by a novel type of non-fungible tokens known as Ordinal inscriptions. What sets these NFTs apart is that all of their data is etched onto the Bitcoin blockchain, diverging from Ethereum NFTs which are reliant on off-chain metadata that can be altered. Here’s a closer look at Ordinal inscriptions and their potential impact on the future of Bitcoin.

Ordinal inscriptions are a type of NFT that can be created on the Bitcoin blockchain, which allows for all of the data to be directly inscribed on the chain. This is in contrast to Ethereum NFTs, which rely on off-chain metadata. Due to this distinction, Ordinals are considered a potential solution to the challenges that are associated with Ethereum NFTs.

Ordinal inscriptions serve as a means of organizing data on the Bitcoin blockchain. The Bitcoin blockchain functions as a decentralized ledger of all Bitcoin transactions, and Ordinal inscriptions provide a unique identifier for each transaction.

While these identifiers are useful for tracking and verifying transactions, there are concerns about the potential for issues, such as “transaction malleability,” to arise as a result of Ordinal inscriptions. Some experts have raised concerns in this regard.

The term transaction malleability refers to the ability of a third party to modify a transaction ID without altering the transaction itself. This can result in confusion and make it more challenging to track and verify transactions.

The concern with Ordinal inscriptions is that if they are not used correctly, they may lead to an environment in which transaction malleability is more prevalent. This could have the effect of making it harder to rely on Bitcoin as a secure and dependable method of payment and transfer.

Fortunately, many experts in the crypto community are aware of the potential risks associated with Ordinal inscriptions and are taking steps to mitigate them. One of the most significant efforts in this regard is the implementation of Segregated Witness (SegWit).

SegWit is a software upgrade that allows for more efficient use of the Bitcoin blockchain by separating signature data from transaction data. This helps to decrease the size of transactions and reduces their susceptibility to malleability.

Beyond SegWit, ongoing efforts are being made to develop other solutions to address the potential risks associated with Ordinal inscriptions. The Lightning Network is one such solution, as it is a layer of two solutions that enables faster and less expensive Bitcoin transactions by conducting them off-chain.

Should you be concerned? If you are a casual Bitcoin user, you likely do not need to be overly concerned about Ordinal inscriptions. The potential risks associated with them primarily affect those involved in more complex Bitcoin transactions, such as multi-signature wallets or smart contracts.

Despite the potential benefits of Ordinal inscriptions, there has been a lot of debate over whether they are a “good use” of block space. As more Ordinals are being inscribed, the cost of Bitcoin transactions has risen. Ordinals introduce additional, non-financial data on the Bitcoin blockchain, which can bog down on-chain confirmation times. This includes images, audio clips, and even games. Those not in favour of Ordinals see this as an impediment to the ability of Bitcoin to scale and reach full global adoption.

Inscribing non-fungible characteristics to satoshis, the individual increments of Bitcoin, may challenge its use in place of conventional currency. Ordinals challenge the fungibility of satoshis on the Bitcoin network, as all satoshis should be equal, or they begin to lose a significant trait of money. But Ordinals can alter the value of these units of money, much like rare collectible coins. This debate over whether these individual units must be deemed equal is unfolding before our eyes and needs to be understood.

Bitcoin is money, and that’s the largest and most important use case, impacting the most people in the world. In the end, I believe that Ordinals will remain niche. While Ordinals may be viewed as exciting, they are unlikely to become the go-to choice for many people who use Bitcoin’s block space.

Ultimately, the markets decide. One of the biggest yet baseless claims is that Bitcoin doesn’t evolve or change. While there may be some truth to this, any changes to the protocol should be slow and methodological. Ultimately, the markets will decide whether Ordinal inscriptions are a viable solution for the challenges associated with Ethereum NFTs.

One key factor to remember about Bitcoin, and any other digital asset, is that its success depends on market demand. If the market values the features offered by Ordinal inscriptions, then they are likely to be adopted and integrated into the Bitcoin network. However, if the market does not value them, then they will remain a niche offering.

While Ordinal inscriptions may pose some potential risks to the Bitcoin network, the crypto community is actively working to address these issues. As long as you take appropriate precautions to protect your Bitcoin holdings, there’s no need to be overly concerned about this discussion in the short term. In fact, these discussions help to strengthen and test the resilience of the Bitcoin network. I see lots of positivity in this.

 

Source: https://intpolicydigest.org/what-do-ordinal-inscriptions-mean-for-the-future-of-bitcoin/

Anndy Lian is an early blockchain adopter and experienced serial entrepreneur who is known for his work in the government sector. He is a best selling book author- “NFT: From Zero to Hero” and “Blockchain Revolution 2030”.

Currently, he is appointed as the Chief Digital Advisor at Mongolia Productivity Organization, championing national digitization. Prior to his current appointments, he was the Chairman of BigONE Exchange, a global top 30 ranked crypto spot exchange and was also the Advisory Board Member for Hyundai DAC, the blockchain arm of South Korea’s largest car manufacturer Hyundai Motor Group. Lian played a pivotal role as the Blockchain Advisor for Asian Productivity Organisation (APO), an intergovernmental organization committed to improving productivity in the Asia-Pacific region.

An avid supporter of incubating start-ups, Anndy has also been a private investor for the past eight years. With a growth investment mindset, Anndy strategically demonstrates this in the companies he chooses to be involved with. He believes that what he is doing through blockchain technology currently will revolutionise and redefine traditional businesses. He also believes that the blockchain industry has to be “redecentralised”.

www.anndy.com
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Going back to basics. Do I really need another picture of an ape? NFT market slumps in August

Going back to basics. Do I really need another picture of an ape? NFT market slumps in August

The article did reflect some of my views but also did not. The core message that I was trying to say is that the NFT market is at the rebuilding stage right now. The previous highs that were in the bull market are in a challenging stage. The prices were unsustainable, and it will continue this way as the macro environment is not looking too optimistic now.

There are many contributing factors to this current state but is this the end of the NFT markets? It is not.

Right now there are more projects in the markets working hard behind the scene working on content, books, music, and better gaming assets and experiences. The speculation market has died down, and this is actually very healthy for all of us to grow.

This is a time to go back to basics. We can look at the 5Ps of marketing- Product, Price, Promotion, Place, and People.

When we are in the bull market, whatever products can sell without doing anything. But in the current times, we need to look at the product. Is it value for money?

Pricing is another factor to look at. PFP in the good times can start at a 1 ETH floor price. We should watch our pricing more carefully right now. Take my NFT book, for example, I choose to launch it on Bybit NFT Marketplace at $2.99, not $29.99. This decision was made after looking at the market and the demand from my communities.

Lastly, I think people and community are what we should be building too. If you do not have this, this is the best time to look into it now. This will also help you to get better results when the market turns better.

Anndy Lian

 

Do I really need another picture of an ape? NFT market slumps in August

The NFT hype from earlier in the year is dying off as the market continues its downward path into the final third of the year. Fire sale coming for apes and cats?

The number of unique non-fungible token (NFT) buyers in August fell below 500,000 for the first time in a year and extended the drop in purchasers to four consecutive months, according to NFT aggregation site CryptoSlam.

Due to an increase in Ethereum prices in early August, total sales rose to US$730 million from July’s US$650 million, but remain a long way short of this year’s January peak of US$4.5 billion.

Yehudah Petscher, NFT relations strategist for CryptoSlam, said the NFT market has caught up with the rest of the world, as traditional markets have been hammered by concerns about rising inflation and interest rates, as well as other global developments.

“People are being much more selective with what they buy and questioning, ‘Do I really want to buy this picture of an ape or a cat for $500?’” Petscher told Forkast in an interview. “You used to give no pause before and you would buy that and you were happy to. And now no, now you need a product. You need something more than just the picture.”

The previous high prices in the NFT market were unsustainable, said Anndy Lian, author of the new book “NFT: From Zero to Hero,” in an email response to questions. The “[NFT] environment is not looking too optimistic,” he said, though added that price retrenchments are also when companies build anew.

The Merge

One event on the horizon could further disrupt the NFT market — Ethereum’s Merge planned for later in September.

The Merge will see the world’s second-largest blockchain, which has a market cap of just under US$200 billion and accounted for almost 70% of all NFT transactions in August, move from a proof-of-work (PoW) consensus algorithm to proof-of-stake (PoS).

The buzz around the Merge, saw Ethereum prices almost double in a month to reach as high as US$2,022 in mid-August. Ethereum Classic, the original blockchain from which Ethereum was forked, also more than doubled in the same period to a five-month high of US$45.51.

Both have since fallen back, with Ethereum trading at US$1,587 on Friday in Asia and Ethereum Classic at US$32.67.

Petscher said the Merge might “introduce a little chaos” to the market.

As part of the Merge, all NFTs currently hosted on the PoW blockchain must be replicated on the new PoS network to become the “official” versions of the NFTs.

OpenSea, by far the industry’s largest marketplace, announced Thursday that they will only be supporting the PoS versions of NFT collections, but that doesn’t mean a market for the PoW versions won’t emerge, Petscher said.

Deja vu?

This situation is not without precedent. A debate emerged earlier this year surrounding the authenticity of CryptoPunks – one of the market’s leading collections with over US$2 billion in sales – as the current collections are actually re-issues designed to fix a bug in the original run, now known as V1 CryptoPunks.

While the CryptoPunks creators, Lava Labs, originally sought to discredit the V1 collection, collectors pushed back and now V1 CryptoPunks are traded in their own right as a piece of NFT history — though with much smaller total sales of US$75 million.

Aside from the Merge, Petscher said it will take a significant catalyst from outside the NFT industry to shake off the current market slump. One example could be Apple Inc. releasing its long-awaited virtual reality (VR) headset, which Petscher says has huge potential for NFT integration.

“It’s going to require something big like that,” he said. “Unless, of course, the world changes; if  suddenly the war ends and the traditional stock market starts improving, that would lead to the good times again.”

“But I don’t think anybody sees that on the horizon right now.”

 

Source: https://forkast.news/picture-ape-nft-market-slumps-august/

Anndy Lian is an early blockchain adopter and experienced serial entrepreneur who is known for his work in the government sector. He is a best selling book author- “NFT: From Zero to Hero” and “Blockchain Revolution 2030”.

Currently, he is appointed as the Chief Digital Advisor at Mongolia Productivity Organization, championing national digitization. Prior to his current appointments, he was the Chairman of BigONE Exchange, a global top 30 ranked crypto spot exchange and was also the Advisory Board Member for Hyundai DAC, the blockchain arm of South Korea’s largest car manufacturer Hyundai Motor Group. Lian played a pivotal role as the Blockchain Advisor for Asian Productivity Organisation (APO), an intergovernmental organization committed to improving productivity in the Asia-Pacific region.

An avid supporter of incubating start-ups, Anndy has also been a private investor for the past eight years. With a growth investment mindset, Anndy strategically demonstrates this in the companies he chooses to be involved with. He believes that what he is doing through blockchain technology currently will revolutionise and redefine traditional businesses. He also believes that the blockchain industry has to be “redecentralised”.

www.anndy.com
j j j

The X-to-Earn model: Eat, sleep, do almost anything and get paid in crypto

The X-to-Earn model: Eat, sleep, do almost anything and get paid in crypto

Are you a good runner? Or eater? Or sleeper? Chances are whatever you’re good at, there’s a Web3 project out there to reward you in crypto. But do the tokenomics stack up?

Axie Infinity — a non-fungible token-based online video game that’s generated over US$4 billion in secondary NFT sales — is credited with kicking off the so-called “play-to-earn” (P2E) craze, allowing gamers to earn money while playing. While the Axie hype has somewhat died down, it also spawned a series of copycat projects that pay users to perform everyday activities.

These projects have developed into an industry of their own; a sort of “X-activity-to-earn” (X2E) model, now including tie-ins with brands from Asics to European soccer clubs, paying users in cryptocurrency for running, eating or even sleeping.

Perhaps not surprisingly, questions are being raised about the economic principles many of these projects are founded on.

“The problem with some of these X2E models is that it seems like a really good innovation, but then it is just purely a Ponzi [scheme],” said Anndy Lian, author of the new book “NFT: From Zero to Hero,” in an interview with Forkast, though he did not mention any by name. “And it’s actually very disturbing, to be really honest.”

Without ongoing revenue to support what is being paid out, Lian said, the X2E model risks becoming an unsustainable compensation structure, relying on the hope that more people will come in to “pay” for the tokens that were previously dropped.

There were similar accusations leveled at Axie Infinity after a period of explosive growth failed to generate earlier returns for its users, as its native token SLP is now trading at US$0.004 at press time after reaching as high as US$0.41 in May 2021.

Running tokenomics

One of the more popular variations of this new industry model is the “Move-to-Earn” (M2E) project StepN, which pays users in cryptocurrency for walking, jogging or cycling by tracking their movements via GPS on their phone.

To participate in the project, users buy NFT sneakers and hold them in their wallets on their phones when they go for a walk and are then compensated for the exercise in the project’s native currency, Green Satoshi Tokens (GST).

Users then cash out GST for profit or invest it back into the project to mint additional NFTs for other users to buy.

Brian Lu, founding partner of investment fund Infinity Ventures Crypto, is more optimistic about the outlook for these projects than Lian, however, telling Forkast in an interview there are ways such projects can be successful.

“There’s always going to [need to] be people to support the token or the token has to have some type of utility [for the project to work],” he said.

StepN does this by allowing users to cash out their GST for profit or by investing it back into the ecosystem to mint more sneaker NFTs. This was the tokenomics model initially adopted by Axie Infinity, which allowed users to cash out their SLP or to re-invest it back to create more “Axies” — Pokémon-like creatures that players bred and battled to earn more SLP.

After launching in December, GST reached a high of US$9.03 in late April before the crash along with the rest of the crypto market in May. Despite tie-ins with sports-brand Asics and Spanish soccer club Atlético de Madrid, GST had fallen to under US$1 by early June, and has been trading under US$0.10 since early July.

Sleeping on the job

Positioning itself in direct response to the Move-to-Earn projects, Gang Azit Social Club (GASC) has taken a different approach, and wants to remind users that it’s important for one’s mental health to take a break and relax from time to time, and incentivizes this practice by paying them to do just that.

Calling itself a “Relax-to-Earn” project, GASC detects when users are within a predetermined zone using GPS and pays them in the project’s HIPS token if they press a “relax” button on their phone while in the space.

If anyone needs an incentive to eat, Esca — an online marketplace for food consumers and vendors — promises to pay customers, restaurants and at-home chefs in both Bitcoin and USDC. According to its website, Esca thinks the commissions charged by most food delivery platforms are too high and is using cryptocurrency to balance the equation.

So many projects have popped up promising to pay users to sleep that there is even its own category of finance for the industry — SleepFi.

The Sleepee app pays users based on their sleep quality score in its native currency, which can be converted to buy products or services in their store. Even the Move-to-Earn app MetaGym offers a SleepFi feature that pays users in its native token that can be spent in-app or cashed out for USDC.

The future of Web3 and gaming

Measuring the success of these projects over the past few months has been difficult amid the broader crypto downturn, which has seen even well-established crypto funds and businesses file for bankruptcy or needing a bailout.

If the situation doesn’t improve soon, Lu says there are other options available to such projects.

“These X2E projects that are coming up [are] going to start learning to advertise their users and their user’s behavior [and] user data to marketing companies that are willing to pay for it,” said Lu, explaining this process will become more commonplace as brand tie-in continues to gain traction.

Selling user data may seem against the ethos of Web3, which is often touted to offer a new incentive model to break away from the data mining method of business which has led to massive wealth concentration from a few giant tech companies.

Back to the genre that started it all, Lu says the industry has learned its lesson from the short-lived success of Axie Infinity and is shifting from Play-to-Earn to Play-and-Earn, or Web 2.5.

These projects are putting gameplay back at the center of the game, with the option to earn money — sometimes even in fiat — a bonus element rather than making a game whose main draw card is earning.

Lian is hopeful these types of games can still survive in the meantime, but says it will be a long time before the mainstream gaming industry adopts Web3 in any meaningful way.

“I don’t think the super app is coming anytime soon,” said Lian, who explained the technology is there but the US$300 billion a year gaming industry has little incentive to change. “[Game studios] might not be agreeable to how it is actually going to help them since they are really making millions of dollars in revenue every year.”

 

Source: https://forkast.news/x-to-earn-model-eat-sleep-anything-paid-crypto/

Anndy Lian is an early blockchain adopter and experienced serial entrepreneur who is known for his work in the government sector. He is a best selling book author- “NFT: From Zero to Hero” and “Blockchain Revolution 2030”.

Currently, he is appointed as the Chief Digital Advisor at Mongolia Productivity Organization, championing national digitization. Prior to his current appointments, he was the Chairman of BigONE Exchange, a global top 30 ranked crypto spot exchange and was also the Advisory Board Member for Hyundai DAC, the blockchain arm of South Korea’s largest car manufacturer Hyundai Motor Group. Lian played a pivotal role as the Blockchain Advisor for Asian Productivity Organisation (APO), an intergovernmental organization committed to improving productivity in the Asia-Pacific region.

An avid supporter of incubating start-ups, Anndy has also been a private investor for the past eight years. With a growth investment mindset, Anndy strategically demonstrates this in the companies he chooses to be involved with. He believes that what he is doing through blockchain technology currently will revolutionise and redefine traditional businesses. He also believes that the blockchain industry has to be “redecentralised”.

www.anndy.com
j j j