A Mix of Technology and Trivia on Ordinals, Inscriptions, BRC-20s, and Other Interesting Things
Article by Tigi76 | Edited by Hiro Kennelly and Trewkat | Cover Art by Tonytad
You will not find a more trendy topic in crypto today than Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens. In just a few short months, an incredible number of Inscriptions have been made (check out this list of total Inscriptions to date). During this time new acronyms proliferated, such as BRC-20, ORC-20, and SRC-20, and we saw the emergence of DeFi products forked from Balancer for the Bitcoin network. We have seen influencers flourish, communities, marketplaces and tools of all kinds develop, and many of crypto’s most prominent analysts and researchers are paying attention.
Please note: I will not analyze the performance of any token on the Bitcoin blockchain and try to stay away from talking about the financial aspects of this crazy world of Bitcoin.
I’ll focus on some interesting but also strange (and even funny) details about the Bitcoin blockchain, a few of the newer protocols that are emerging alongside Inscriptions and BRC-20s, and hint at the new trends.
Of course, remember… This is not financial advice. DYOR
Ordinals and Inscriptions
Let’s start with the origins. Contrary to what you may think, using the Bitcoin blockchain for more than just peer-to-peer payments goes back further than December 2022 when, for the first time, Ordinals were mentioned.
As always, Bitcoin was ahead of its time.
In 2012, the Colored Coins project aimed to attach real-world assets to Bitcoin’s UTXO set. In 2014, the first NFT was released on the Bitcoin blockchain. Its name was Quantum, a generative art piece created by Jennifer and Kevin McCoy. In 2017, Rare Pepes was released — if you have ever wondered, as I have, why these green frogs are so famous you can read the story of Pepe the Frog, study the Rare Pepe Directory, and check out this Bankless article.
Rare Pepes was made possible using a Bitcoin sidechain named Counterparty. The sidechain is live and hosts a number of projects. Apart from these, Stacks is another sidechain project that deserves mention; Stacks uses Clarity language for smart contracts and has its own chain, compiler, and coding language. It runs in sync with Bitcoin to ensure transaction integrity.
Anyway, after this historical detour, let’s return closer to the present.
In December 2022, Bitcoin developer Casey Rodarmor released open-source ORD Software, which runs on top of a full Bitcoin Core node and allows users to encode computer files into hexadecimal data within a Bitcoin transaction. Thus was born the Rodarmor Theory. The core principle — some would say insight — of the Rodarmor Theory is that it is possible to order satoshis chronologically based upon when they were mined.
For background: A satoshi is the smallest unit of account on the Bitcoin network, and each bitcoin contains 100 million satoshi (colloquially known as