Recent reports from Matrixport suggested that batteries (STX): A smart contract protocol layer that operates on top of bitcoins (BTC): It could well be destined to become a “billion dollar token” thanks to its association with new bitcoinsbased on (BTC) non-fungible token (NFT) Bitcoin Ordinals, but how closely are the two protocols intertwined?
According to Dune’s analysis data, almost 178,000 Bitcoin Ordinals have been “signed up” to the bitcoin blockchain permanently, spending $1.273 million in fees, all of those fees are BTC. This innovation also had the effect of increasing the size of bitcoin blocks and has already added almost 3.3 gigabytes to the data that any full node will be forced to download despite only launching on January 21, 2023.
As explained in a recent analysis, Bitcoin Ordinals takes advantage of the 75% discounted block space reserved for Taproot scripts released on November 12, 2021 to save short videos, images, and other types of content directly to the chain and provide an all-inclusive. -a decentralized NFT solution. Still, this was not the intended use of this feature with Bitcoin only allowing 80 bytes of transaction space for non-financial data in the form of OP_RETURN input, while such NFTs can easily take most of a block for themselves.
Many feel that Bitcoin Ordinals is a misuse of the bitcoin blockchain that could outperform some of its financial applications and decrease the decentralization of the network by putting additional pressure on full nodes. Still, no feature of Bitcoin Ordinals takes advantage of anything that is not part of the base protocol: in other words, Stacks is not involved.
Still, stacks liza a total of 21 decentralized applications (DApps) involving NFTs based on its protocol; among them, only three mention the keyword “Ordinals” on their website. Of those three, one is a data platform, another only mentions Bitcoin Ordinals in a blog post. The third is Gamma, a service that allows its users to sign up Bitcoin Ordinals.
a video tutorial published by Gamma two weeks ago shows that it allows users to create a Bitcoin Ordinal with an image or text; interestingly, only BTC is involved in the transaction. Where stacks come into the picture is on the Gamma auction page, where Bitcoin ordinals are listed with prices in STX.
In other words, when it comes to the Ordinals ecosystem, Stacks’ main involvement is being a means of payment in the auctions of those assets and acting as an OpenSea NFT marketplace equivalent. Still, if it is enough It remains to be seen if STX becomes a multi-billion dollar token as suggested by Matrixport according to a Coindesk report.
OpenSea, which already supports eight blockchains, is likely to add another to its collection; Whether or not Stacks will become the main protocol for powering Bitcoin Ordinals trading is still largely unknown, given how young the ecosystem still is. OpenSea, the world’s largest NFT exchange with its eight supported protocols, reached a $13 billion valuation with its C funding round in early January 2022.
