Bitcoin ecosystem innovative applications are in full bloom
Bitcoin is no longer just 'digital gold'; its ecosystem is thriving in 2024: the total amount of Ordinals inscriptions has exceeded 500 million, the number of Lightning Network nodes has reached 120,000, and the TVL of Stacks smart contracts is over $10 billion. Emerging application scenarios include: 1) Total locked value of DeFi protocols exceeds $15 billion; 2) Daily trading volume of NFT marketplaces reaches $100 million; 3) Domain name system registrations total 8 million. Institutional layout is clearly accelerating, with Grayscale launching a Bitcoin ecosystem special fund and Coinbase listing BRC-20 index futures. The technical bottleneck lies in the limited functionality of smart contracts, but new protocols like RGB++ are changing this situation.