On January 10, 2024, all eleven Bitcoin ETFs were approved by SEC, opening a new chapter of digital assets. It also marked the official start of this bitcoin-fueled bull run. Unanimously, both traditional finance and crypto natives recognize that the Bitcoin ecosystem is one of the biggest opportunities this cycle.
Despite Bitcoin being the largest asset by market cap, its ecosystem has been consistently underdeveloped mainly due to the lack of programmability. This is the major reason of the rise of etheruem, solana and the rest layer one chains. In my previous post, I wrote about the class of 2017 builders who pioneered the bitcoin ecosystem. This post will focus on the emerging players, aka class of 2022/23 builders.
Casey, ORDI and BRC-20
It is hard not to talk about Casey when we are on this topic — The creator of the Ordinals. What are Ordinals? For people who are less familiar with Bitcoin, satoshi, not bitcoin, is the atomic, native cryptocurrency of the bitcoin network. Each bitcoin equals to 100,000,000 satoshis. Ordinals assigns unique serial numbers to each satoshi and enable attaching data to them. This process is known as “inscription”. The bitcoin inscriptions are durable, immutable and secure as bitcoin itself. The Ordinal Protocol were first launched in December 2022 and was widely used to mint Ordinal NFTs. Built on top of the Ordinals, three months later, another bitcoin developer Domo introduced BRC-20 protocol, a protocol that enables fungible token issuance similar to ERC-20 on Ethereum.
With no surprise, Casey launched the first BRC-20 token $ORDI in March 2023. Nine months after its debut, $ORDI reached a $1 billion market cap. At the time of this article, there are a total of 615 BRC-20 tokens (source: BRC-20.io).
Collectively, the top BRC-20 tokens listed by Coingecko has a market cap of $2.8 billion.
Runes
In response to the reveal of BRC-20, Casey announced in a tweet in September 2023 that he is working on a new protocol. It is based on Bitcoin’s UTXOs and should bring a more simple and integrated approach to tokenization.
However, he is in no hurry to roll it out. One problem we often have with great talent.
I also find the Readme section on his Github Repo super interesting. This guy tells the hard truth.
Trac
Trac is building an ecosystem that can be broken down into three parts: Trac Core (the decentralized indexer for bitcoin metaprotocol tracking), the TAP protocol (bringing Decentralized Finance to Ordinals) and PIPE (UTXO token & Collectible protocol for Bitcoin).
On January 26 this year, Trac Core beta went live. Trac Core is the first and only decentralized data tracking solution in Bitcoin ecosystem. The data availability enables developers to focus on more important aspects of product creation.
The ambition of TAP Protocol is to bring DeFi to Bitcoin Ordinals. Similar to Ethereum DeFi ecosystem, TAP Protocol will introduce new capabilities to Bitcoin Ordinals, such as gaming, bridging, swaping and staking etc.
PIPE is a Bitcoin-native token protocol inspired by RUNES and BRC-20. It aims to combine the strengths of both ideas by incorporating three functions: Deploy, Mint, and Transfer. These functions allow for the deployment of new tokens, minting based on deployment rules, and sending tokens to selected recipients.
Atomical
Similar to PIPE, Atomical uses Bitcoin’s UTXO model for minting tokens where 1 token = 1 sat. Different from PIPE, there are no official ARC20 tokens associated with the Atomicals Protocol, and any tokens with similar names are independent creations of the community.
The Atomicals Protocol’s digital objects exist directly on Bitcoin as UTXOs and Satoshis, with no side-chain, making Bitcoin the global consensus database for the protocol.
The protocol allows users to create various digital assets on Bitcoin, aiming to provide immutable, permanent, and authenticated data storage on the Bitcoin ledger.
One year ago, I posted a Twitter thread on Bitcoin DeFi and people immediately commented on the various limitations of the bitcoin blockchain. Fast forward to today, and no one doubts the potential of the bitcoin ecosystem anymore. This is only the beginning.