A panoramic scan of Bitcoin ecological innovative applications
The Bitcoin ecosystem is set for a full explosion in 2024: The total amount of Ordinals inscriptions has surpassed 800 million, the number of Lightning Network nodes has reached 150,000, and the TVL of Stacks smart contracts exceeds 15 billion USD. Emerging application scenarios include: 1) The total locked value of DeFi protocols surpasses 20 billion; 2) The daily transaction volume of the NFT trading market is 150 million USD; 3) The domain name system registration volume exceeds 10 million. Institutional layout has clearly accelerated, with Grayscale launching a special fund for the Bitcoin ecosystem and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange listing BRC-20 index futures. The technical bottleneck lies in the limited functions of smart contracts, but new protocols such as RGB++ and BitVM are changing this situation, and more groundbreaking innovations are expected to emerge in 2025.