10th May 2023 > > Ordinals & BRC-20.

tl;dr

Another look at Ordinals and BRC-20 with several tools you can use to explore and experiment.

Market Snap (at time of writing)

Market Wrap

April’s CPI (Consumer Price Index) report for the US is due today. Despite the lack of vigour in the collation of all economic statistics, markets have precious few other data points. Divergence from the consensus can often be the trigger for material market moves, and bouts of volatility.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Ordinals and BRC-20

Ordinals and BRC-20 are a hot topic. If your knowledge is a little flaky, then may I suggest referring to the CCCs published on 19th, 20th,& 21st February 2023, and 4th May 2023 for a little bit of background.

If you can’t be bothered to check out those missives the tl;dr is that ordinals can be compared to NFTs (non-fungible tokens) in some respects and using BRC-20 they have given rise to a plethora of new cryptos built on the BTC blockchain.

On 4th May I reported that 8,550 BRC-20 coins had a market value of $113mm, a near 600% rise in a week. Things have moved on since as they do.

The market cap of all BRC-20 coins just six days later is now $650mm, a 6x increase or thereabouts. At the time the market cap of the first BRC-20 coin ORDI was $60mm or so – it is now half a billion dollars:

https://ordspace.org/brc20

In a similar fashion to CryptoPunks, ORDI was free to mint except for gas fees. There are some happy ORDI holders out there.

Whenever there are new tech developments it can be hard for us non-techies who are not coders to get properly involved, if that is what one wishes to do.

Solutions to this problem are coming at us thick and fast.

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The most obvious solution, but also the least useful, is that some BRC-20 coins are now being listed on centralised crypto-currency exchanges.

I think gate.io was first out with a listing for ORDI on 7th May 2023 which was the event largely responsible for its 1,000% price increase since the CCC first looked at BRC-20 coins. Since then several other exchanges have got involved, and several other coins are now also on gate.io.

But simply buying and selling cryptos on an exchange is not what the CCC community is about. That is just speculation, gambling, buying lottery tickets. Call it what you will, you might get lucky, but probably not. In any case, buying a coin after a listing often amounts to no more than providing exit liquidity to early adopters. That is most likely to be a painful experience.

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There are now three ordinal-specific wallets – Ordinals Wallet, Xverse, and Unisat. The links to each are here:

https://ordinalswallet.com/create-wallet

https://www.xverse.app/download

https://unisat.io/

I have used the last of those three. The set-up process is simple with a 12-word seed phrase. As always, keep that seed phrase stored in a safe place. Anyone with access to it has access to your wallet, but you know that already.

The front-end of Unisat is simple – there are options to receive BTC or BRC-20 coins, or to send BTC or BRC-20 coins. And that is it for now. We should expect rapid development of these wallets, and other new ones, daily.

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There are other tools too.

Inscribe your own ordinal:

https://ordinalswallet.com/inscribe

Deploy your own new BRC-20 coin:

https://brc-20.io/inscribe

You can find a handbook here which goes into more detail than we do here in the CCC:

https://docs.ordinals.com/introduction.html

Ledger is also getting in on the action with support for Ordinals and BRC-20 coins, which suggests to me that this area of activity has some legs to it. Note that you need to set up a new Ordinal specific account within Ledger, to prevent accidentally sending an inscribed Satoshi within a normal transaction.

An Ordinal Punk sold for 9.5 BTC, over $200k:

https://ordinals.com/inscription/b8ce900663108e2e07994632722b01ba86dfaa37e6636080828262f719c99ef7i0

Inscribed on 1st February 2023 as Ordinal 620 I think I would take $200k for the five minutes of work it took to create.

There are already four Ordinal inscriptions marketplaces up and running, working in a similar fashion to OpenSea. At least one of these, gamma.io has a simple process of supplying your digital assets to allow others to quickly inscribe their own Ordinal:

https://gamma.io/create/deploy/btc/public

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The pace of development is breath taking.