Two titans battle for NFT supremacy
This past weekend saw two major cryptocurrency/non-fungible token events, Veecon Indianapolis 2023 and BTC Miami/Ordinals Conference 2023.
I chose to travel to Indianapolis to meet my colleagues who I have worked with for almost three years without meeting them in real life.
At one point, walking back to the hotel on the streets of Indianapolis, it became clear to me that there was a divide in the NFT community. One was the “status quo” pre-teen ETH-based community meeting at Veecon, and the other was a newborn baby in Miami at BTC Miami/Ordinals 2023.
On Discard Labs, we at CryptoSlam.io are working to “unite the NFT community.” Ever since our co-founder Randy Wasinger added Loom (Sorare), Flow and WAX chains, along with Ethereum in early 2021, we have always tried to include every new and relevant chain we can.
I also met many NFT celebrities, including Richerd Chan from Manifold.xyz, which has created some of the most widely used Ethereum smart contracts in the NFT industry. He had actually contacted me in 2020 through a client at the time and we had only talked online but never met in person and now he had so many people around him that I could only talk to him briefly.
As an epic Ethereum NFT celebrity and developer, I decided to ask him a very telling question: “Do you develop for Bitcoin?”
His response made it clear that he was not and had no intention of doing so at the moment. He asked a big question in return: “Does the BTC community even support Ordinals?”
That’s a great question, to be honest.
In Miami, the main theme seems to revolve around “laser-eyed maxis” who see Bitcoin as a single use case: to be “better money” and a store of value that shouldn’t be tampered with.
On the other hand, the new Ordinal crew, represented by individuals who @rodarmor, @TO, @LeonidasNFT and @uiwertheimeris leading the charge on alternative use cases like digital artifacts (NFTs) and BRC-20s, which are the bitcoin equivalent of fungible tokens like ETH and BTC.
The latest rankings on CryptoSlam.io show that $OXBT and $ORDI are in the top 10, indicating the rapid rise of Bitcoin in the scene.
Personally, I have never seen an ecosystem start up so quickly, except for NFTs in 2020-2021, and I would argue that it is even faster this time.
Bitcoin market value of over $500 billion is more than double Ethereum’s currency market cap of over $200 billion. The Bitcoin protocol may be better suited for certain types of NFTs, those that see immutability and scarcity as features rather than weaknesses.
Basically, there is a big difference between what we see on ETH and what we see on BTC. The community divides into people who value UX, and corporate partners and one who values ultimate security/scarcity and immutability. While I think there are strengths to each, there is a place for both.
Net new people enter the “NFT” ecosystem, even if they only want to trade Ordinals on BTC or BRC-20s, and they are very small in number, they are net new people. What will happen when the Michael Saylors of the world see the value in Ordinal Theory, and its burgeoning use cases on BTC?
Saylor talks about why Ordinals & Inscriptions is an important conversation, saying 👇
“If I were to discourage application development, I would destroy the Bitcoin mining network.” pic.twitter.com/i2xAayWREz
— trevor.btc @ NYC (@TO) 21 May 2023
While the NFT ecosystem may be seen as divisive, it is actually growing and enjoying itself, and while Taylor Swift fans aren’t coming in droves, the core set of people who see the future of this technology are more excited about the growth of this industry than ever before.
