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Edited by Samiksha at 26-12-2023 12:51 PM
In early 2023, with the explosive emergence of Ordinals, the Bitcoin ecosystem seemed like Pandora's box had been opened. Numerous new and existing protocols emerged on the blockchain, driving the robust development of the Bitcoin ecosystem and bringing many new opportunities and gameplay to the crypto community.
Since the hard fork completed in 2017, the Bitcoin community had been relatively quiet, despite technological advancements like the Lightning Network. It failed to attract much attention from the market. In contrast, Ethereum rapidly grew in strength with trends such as DeFi, NFTs, public chains, and layer 2 solutions. This year, the surge in Ordinals users redirected attention back to the Bitcoin narrative, and for the first time in six years, on-chain fees on the Bitcoin network exceeded those on Ethereum.
Looking back at the developmental history of the Bitcoin ecosystem, even before the emergence of Ordinals, Bitcoin had undergone several significant technological upgrades. In May 2016, the Lightning Network launched its testnet, and by 2017, it completed its first real transaction, allowing users to send and receive Bitcoin rapidly and inexpensively. The concept of Bitcoin layer 2 also entered the public's view. Then, in 2021, the Taproot upgrade brought programmability to Bitcoin.
In December 2022, Casey Rodarmor introduced the Ordinals protocol. This system assigns a sequence number to each sat (satoshi) and tracks them in transactions. Users can attach additional data (images, videos, text, etc.) to each sat via Ordinals on the Bitcoin blockchain, making each sat unique and possessing NFT-like properties.
On March 8, 2023, anonymous developer @domodata introduced BRC-20 based on the Ordinals protocol. This protocol deploys, mints, and transfers tokens by encoding information such as token name and total supply in a standardized JSON format within sats. |
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