Bitcoin NFTs continue to evolve at a rapid pace. A new type of NFT called “Seals” has taken the Bitcoin blockchain by storm this week. What do we know about the stamps?
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What do we know about the stamps?
The name Stamps means “Safely Held Safe Negotiable Art”. Users can use Stamps to embed image data into the Bitcoin blockchain. Since its creation in March, users have created over 10,000 new NFTs using Bitcoin Stamps. By comparison, Bitcoin Ordinals barely cracked 2,000 issued articles in its first month of existence.
Notable Bitcoin personality “Mike in Space” created Stamps. He created the new technology to offer an alternative to the inscription of ordinals. Seals offer many advantages to ordinal inscriptions.
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What are the advantages of using Stamps?
The main advantage of Stamps is the improved decentralization and immutability. Individual node runners may remove data from ordinal NFTs, which could create different versions of the same NFT. At a large enough scale, an entity with enough node brokers could theoretically challenge the consensus on what the correct data should be for any given ordinal enrollment.
In contrast, stamps store images directly in transaction outputs, which prevents node executors from manually changing the data. This difference ensures that any NFT created with Stamps is forever immutable.
Mike in Space writes: “Storing “art on the blockchain” as a method of achieving permanence is often a misnomer in the world of NFTs. Most NFTs are simply image pointers for centralized hosting or stored on-chain in wipeable token data. We propose a method to embed base64-formatted image data using transaction outputs in a novel way… By doing so, the data is persisted in such a way that it is impossible to remove it from a full node, preserving the data immutably forever.”
Bitcoin stamps can also be semi-fungible. Users can issue “1 of 1” or “1 of many” digital assets, similar to Ethereum’s ERC-1155 token standard. This capability opens up many new use cases for NFT technology and is sure to help Stamps gain wider adoption over time.
Finally, Bitcoin stamps are also more data efficient than Bitcoin ordinals. It is not necessary to store stamps on all Bitcoin nodes. This feature makes it easy to create, store, and trade lightweight image files.
Are Bitcoin NFTs Popular?
casey rodarmor created Bitcoin Ordinals in January 2023. His goal was to give Bitcoin fans a methodology to create their own form of non-fungible digital collectibles. Rodarmor, a programmer by trade, figured out a way to assign a numbering scheme to individual Satoshis, the lowest unit of measure for Bitcoin.
By doing so, users could treat each Satoshi as their own unique token and attach digital content to them in a process called “enrollment.” This content can be images, text or video. At first, only people running Bitcoin full nodes could create ordinals. This relatively high entry bar caused a mania in which demand for a small supply of Bitcoin Ordinals skyrocketed. Buyers believe that the low number enrollments in Bitcoin will be historically significant one day. For example, a buyer paid 9.5 BTC for an “Ordinal Punk” in February, worth $215,000 at the time.
Image credit: CryptoPotato.com
Builders like Mike in Space and Casey Rodarmor continue to iterate on Bitcoin more than 14 years after its invention. By building Stamps and Ordinals, they are helping to push the limits of what we can do with blockchain technology.
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This article is educational material.
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