What does Yuga Labs' embrace of Bitcoin NFT say about it?

2023-03-09 10:54

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原文标题：《 YugaLabs 拥抱比特币 NFT 说明了什么？》

Original article by Mike Belshe

This is 0xAR

This is the most delicate time for bitcoin.

YugaLabs, a collection of top NFT's from Boring Apes to crypto-punks, is now worth more than $4 billion. Now, the company known for building blue-chip NFTS is looking at bitcoin.

The picture shows the TwelveFold Series No. 1 NFT released by YugaLabs, which is worth $150,000

The day before yesterday, YugaLanbs auctioned 288 bitcoin NFT for the first time through the Bitcoin Ordinals protocol. TwelveFold, as the collection is called, started at $5 each and sold for a maximum of seven bitcoins worth around $150,000. The auction also brought in $16.5 million for YugaLabs, sending shockwaves through the crypto community.

YugaLabs, as the most powerful NFT, owns three of the top ten NFT series, and also holds a large number of IP resources. But other than Ethereum, there isn't a single chain that's attractive enough for the company to create NFT works. Until last week, when YugaLabs announced its entry into Bitcoin NFT with much fanfare, no one doubted that its next big bet was on bitcoin.

Moreover, Bitcoin is certainly gaining momentum. From Nostr and Damus, the social protocols that integrated the Bitcoin Lightning network in early February, to Ordinals, the NFT protocol that surpassed 300,000 in just two weeks, to the recent deployment of Layer2 expansion protocol, Bitcoin seems to be coming back with a new look.

Bitcoin has long been considered electronic cash, and has never been more of a currency. So far, bitcoin has done a pretty good job of that, but it could be a little more "interesting" to a different group of crypto geeks.

That is to add more possibilities to bitcoin, such as NFT.

In the last bull market, the Bitcoin chain has been born Counterparty protocol, NFT has a certain embryonic form. But casting NFT directly on a chain is far more complicated than doing it in a decentralized application, and Bitcoin is not smart contract-friendly, so NFT has not caught on.

By 2021, Bitcoin's Taproot upgrade had made smart contracts much more accessible and secure, allowing the Ordinals protocol to truly "endow" digital art on blocks. Bitcoin NFT is just starting to catch on.

But the Bitcoin NFT is markedly different from the Ethereum NFT, and possibly even better. Because the data corresponding to the Ethereum NFT, such as pictures, videos and so on, are mostly stored on servers outside the chain, such as IPFS.

This leads to a potential problem. The Ethereum NFT itself is an immutable Token, but the corresponding data can be deleted. One day it's a monkey, the next it's blank. Bitcoin doesn't have this problem because the data is written entirely on blocks and stored forever on the chain.

Even Casey Rodamor, creator of the Ordinals protocol, has created a "destruction address" that allows Ethereum NFT to be destroyed and redeployed or engraved on the Bitcoin network. While investors won't really give up on Ethereum NFTS, it's expected that more will be minted in the Bitcoin network.

According to Dune Analystics, more than 350,000 NFT have been cast on the chain through Ordinals since the beginning of February. This is also a new development for Bitcoin, because more and more people will start using Bitcoin rather than simply carrying it in a hardware wallet.

YugaLabs' embrace of the Ordinals protocol added a new twist to the market, roiling the bitcoin market. One startup, Trust Machine, raised $150 million last year to build an on-chain ecosystem. Now add Counterparty, Liquid, Stacks, RSK, and Lightning, who have been working on the Bitcoin infrastructure for years, and more people will experience a full-fledged bitcoin service.

Right now, the bitcoin community is on fire between those who think the Bitcoin network can't be a testing ground for anything, and those who think that a protocol like Ordinals really opens up new ideas for bitcoin. Ordinals single-handedly boosted non-zero bitcoin addresses to an all-time high of 44 million, according to data monitored by Glassnode.

The Ordinals agreement is open, and YugaLabs' involvement seems to confirm that it is not about to go away. Time will tell the future of Bitcoin. YugaLabs' embrace of Bitcoin NFT seems to send more positive signals, and there are more surprises waiting to be discovered in this new land.