On Feb. 12, Jason Williams tweeted he had burned Bored Ape #1626 for a Bitcoin Ordinal equivalent.
“The NFT community is moving to BTC, where Ordinals have brought true scarcity to collectibles,” he wrote in the Tweet announcing the burn.
“It’s done. Over. Not coming back to ETH,” he wrote.
The move predictably drew the ire of many in the Bored Ape community, eventually making its way to co-founder of Yuga Labs, Greg Solano (@CryptoGarga), who rebutted via Twitter:
“It’s not ‘gone from ETH forever,’ he wrote, “it’s basically the same as any other transfer: If you transfer your ape to an address you no longer control (even if it’s the ‘burn’ address), you have effectively given up your license. And no, before someone asks, that doesn’t mean anyone can access the license. It’s the opposite: If the address isn’t in anyone’s possession, no one can.”
Ordinals have become a trendy tool for Bitcoin node operators to partake in fun projects. So far, they are only traded among them via small Discord channels, with no marketplace like OpenSea serving the supply/demand of the ecosystem.
@dotta described the tooling process as “incredibly bad” in a recent CryptoSlate story about the emergence of Bitcoin Ordinals. Still, given the OG ethos of running a node on the most OG of cryptos (Bitcoin), @dotta said it feels still like “early days alpha.”
It feels like fun early-days of alpha
Swapping Ordinals in small Discord channels via trusted OTC in an awkward way is exactly what alpha tastes like.
You have a passionate group of people who see something special even though the tooling is incredibly bad.
Besides the Ape burn, it seems Yuga Labs may have a lot to worry about in the Ordinals space, mainly after it had emerged that another collection, Ordinals Punks, has also emerged as a popular Ordinals-based collection.
Ordinals are made possible due to what is known as the Taproot soft fork, which extended the block limit from 1MB to 3MB, enabling inscriptions to be placed on the Bitcoin network.
However, it has drawn heated discussion about whether adding arbitrary data to the blockchain clogs the network unnecessarily. “If everyone is going to post stupid cat JPEGs on the blockchain, I can keep buying new hard drives for my node … F*** that sh**. Keep it, compact folks,” one Redditor said.
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