Since the birth of Ordinals, Brc20 and $Ordi, the market has become more and more enthusiastic about the Bitcoin ecosystem. Users who have not studied in detail will find that there are countless new Bitcoin protocols, so this article will summarize them for you. The 6 protocols in the entire Bitcoin ecosystem that have attracted the most attention from users!
Ordinals Agreement
The Ordinals protocol is the most important player in this Bitcoin ecological explosion. It was launched in January 2023 by software engineer Casey Rodarmor. It is a new method of converting Bitcoin into NFT, so the Ordinals protocol is often called Bitcoin NFT.
The Ordinals protocol takes advantage of the uniqueness of the Satoshi, the smallest unit of Bitcoin, to attach a unique ID number to each Satoshi and link it with digital content.
Unlike NFTs on other blockchains such as Ethereum, Ordinals NFTs are minted directly on the Bitcoin mainnet. This means Ordinals NFTs have higher security and reliability than other NFTs.
At present, the Ordinals protocol wallets are most famous for Xverse and Unisat, and the trading market mainly revolves around OKX, Magic Eden and Unisat.
As for the NFT ecosystem on the Ordinals protocol, the more popular projects include:
Bitcoin Frogs
Bitcoin Punks
Bitcoin Apes
DogePunks
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Brc20：Ordi、Sats
Created by @domodata in March 2023, Brc20 is the first experimental fungible token standard on the Bitcoin blockchain, similar to the ERC20 token on Ethereum.
Interestingly, unlike the popular token standard on the Ethereum blockchain, the Brc20 standard does not use smart contracts; instead, it allows users to store a file on Bitcoin and use that file to link the token to a specific Associated with satoshi.
The Ordinals protocol did not receive much attention at first, until the birth of Brc20, which caused crazy market speculation. On the day of the birth of Brc20 alone, the protocol accounted for 90% of the minting volume of the Ordinals protocol and gained a lot of exposure.
At present, Brc20 is mainly built by Unisat as the industry builder. Users can use wallet services, inscription casting, market transactions, etc. on this platform. In the near future, a swap model similar to decentralized trading will be opened, which has attracted market attention.
$Ordi: The first deployed token of Brc20, which has been wildly hyped by the market. The minting cost of the $Ordi token is about 2-3 U. After the crazy hype in May, the highest increase reached 10,000 times, creating a new The myth of wealth creation
$Sats: The Brc20 token with the largest number of mints and holders, with a total number of 2100 trillion. It has attracted attention because it has the same name as sats, the abbreviation of satoshi, the unit of Bitcoin. It is currently the native consumption token of the Unisat exchange swap function.
Runes protocol
Runes, short for Rune Protocol, is a new protocol proposed by Ordinals creator Casey Rodarmor in September 2023 as an alternative to Brc20.
Although the birth of Brc20 attracted market attention, it also led to the creation of many "junk UTXOs", thereby clogging the blockchain network. This was completely different from the original idea of Ordinals founder Casey Rodarmor.
At the same time, he believes that 99.9% of fungible tokens are scams and memes, but Brc20, like casinos, will not disappear soon, so a good fungible token protocol must be created for Bitcoin: Runes
But the Runes protocol is still just a concept, and we still don’t know when it will actually go online.
Pipe protocol
Since Runes was just an idea at the beginning, and whether it can be completed later is still unknown, Benny, the founder of Trac, the decentralized indexing protocol on Ordinals, jumped out to upgrade the Runes protocol to Pipe, and issued $Pipe tokens, representing Runes Protocol and Pipe The first token of the protocol is of great significance.
It is worth noting that the Trac team once issued $Trac tokens in Brc20, so it was also one of the targets of user speculation.
At present, the Pipe protocol has developed the minting platform inscribe3, and other infrastructure is still under development. Therefore, the current $Pipe token mayor is mainly OTC trading.
Taproot Assets (previously Taro)
Taproot Assets is a new protocol released by Lightning Network developer Lightning Labs in late October, allowing developers to issue tokens on Bitcoin and the Lightning Network. These assets can be traded at high speeds and cheaply through the Lightning Network.
The core of Taproot Assets mainly combines the advantages of Bitcoin and Lightning Network:
Security and Stability of the Bitcoin Network
The speed, scalability, and low fees of the Lightning Network.
However, Taproot Assets is different from the Ordinals protocol in that its minting method requires a centralized project party to issue them, and the project party itself can also retain the tokens.
The nature of this distribution goes against the logic of the original Brc20 hype. Originally, Brc20 was led by the community, while Taproot Assets pays more attention to the planning and development of the project side.
Therefore, if the token has no use and cannot be hyped by the community, it will easily go cold.
Atomicals Protocol：ARC20（$Atom）
The underlying logic of the Atomics protocol takes token as the starting point, and each sat UTXO is used to represent the token itself.
Therefore, when users trade Arc20 tokens on the Atomics protocol, they can transfer funds directly without having to mint the transfer inscription in Brc20 in the past, and the transaction confirmation can be completed without the need for a third-party indexer, which solves many common problems in Brc20 in the past. question, is one of Ordinals' main competitors.
The first Arc20 token of the Atomicals protocol is $Atom. Users can purchase it on the Atomicalmarket. The ecological wallet is mainly Atomicals wallet. Since the wallet does not yet have a Chrome extension version, it is recommended to wait for it to go online before installing it. The security is relatively high.
in conclusion
In addition to the above projects, the Bitcoin-related ecosystem also includes RGB, Stacks, BitVM, Orc-cash, Brc100, Orc20 and countless other protocols or Layer2 networks.
In the last bull market, all applications were basically based on Ethereum, including the currently popular GameFi, SocialFi, DeFi, etc. Can the vigorous development of the Bitcoin ecosystem catch up with the current development speed of Ethereum?
It may not matter in the short term, because users in the cryptocurrency market like to hype new narratives, especially the well-known "Bitcoin", which may attract more users and funds, leading the market to the next bull market.
But in the long run, unless Bitcoin’s smart contract applications and ecosystem can surpass Ethereum, why not just stay in the existing ecosystem to derive more applications?
