Issuing tokens, buying domains, what are the Bitcoin NFT ecosystems playing with?

Author: Cookie, Rhythm BlockBeats

In the cooling market environment for ETH NFTs, more and more players are shifting their focus to the Bitcoin NFT market. Although the popularity of the Bitcoin NFT market continues to rise, many players still linger outside the door of the Bitcoin NFT world. In addition to the high learning curve due to incomplete infrastructure, feeling unfamiliar with the current project trends in the Bitcoin NFT market is also one of the issues.

Rhythm BlockBeats will outline the main categories of Bitcoin NFT projects for you in this article. What are Bitcoin NFT players engaging with? Let's take a look.

BRC-20 Token

In the article "Issuing Tokens on the Bitcoin Network? Learn How to Mint BRC-20," the author has provided a detailed introduction to BRC-20 Tokens. In simple terms, the current BRC-20 Tokens can still be understood as "speculative NFTs," because the infrastructure related to transfers is not yet complete, and most over-the-counter transactions are conducted by directly selling wallets with "valid Mint inscriptions (NFTs)" private keys.

At the same time, the vast majority of over-the-counter transactions are for $ordi, as $ordi is the first successfully deployed BRC-20 Token. Currently, the trading price of $ordi in the over-the-counter market has risen from 1000 $ordi = 10u to 1000 $ordi = 50~60u.

There hasn't been significant progress in the infrastructure related to BRC-20 Token trading recently, but some statistical index websites have emerged, such as "brc-20.io". Through this website, we can quickly check how many BRC-20 Token balances are under a target address, as well as view all the types of BRC-20 Tokens that have been successfully deployed and their available Mint quantities.

brc-20.io

.sats Domain Name

If you are a player just getting into Bitcoin NFTs, minting your own .sats domain name is a good starting choice. Currently, .sats domain names have already received some initial empowerment. For example, the UniSat wallet now supports transfers to Bitcoin addresses corresponding to .sats domain names:

Using UniSat to transfer to the address corresponding to the .sats domain name

Additionally, the first social application based on the decentralized social protocol Nostr, "Damus," is about to support using .sats domain names as usernames.

Like BRC-20 Tokens, minting a .sats domain name is equivalent to minting a text-type BTC NFT.

The rules for determining the validity of a .sats domain name are simple and widely accepted in the Bitcoin NFT market—"First is First." Although anyone can repeatedly write the same text to mint the same text-type NFT, only the first successful mint is considered valid.

Before minting your own .sats domain name, you need to check whether the target domain name has already been minted through the official Sats Names index API. The query method is to directly access https://api.sats.id/names/xxx.sats (replace xxx.sats with the target domain name you want to mint).

If the target domain name has not been minted, the following prompt will appear:

“xxxx.sats not found”

If the target domain name has already been minted, the following prompt will appear:

The prompt will include the inscription ID of the target domain name, the holder's address, and other information

Once confirmed, we can use some Bitcoin NFT minting tools to register the domain name. In "Issuing Tokens on the Bitcoin Network? Learn How to Mint BRC-20," the author has detailed the minting process for BRC-20 Tokens. For domain names, simply change the mint type to ".sats" and refer to the minting process for BRC-20 Tokens.

Select mint type as ".sats"

If you want to purchase a domain name, you need to check the validity of the NFT before buying. Tools like UniSat can now conveniently perform this check. For example, using UniSat:

From the query results, we can see that 342 "111.sats" have been minted. However, according to the "First is First" rule, only the inscription number #173458 of "111.sats" NFT is valid (UniSat has marked this NFT with a check), and purchasing any other "111.sats" NFTs would be invalid.

Currently, nearly 60,000 valid (unique) domain names have been registered (minted), and the NFTs corresponding to these domain names account for nearly 15% of the total number of Bitcoin NFTs. In the Ordinals Wallet market, .sats domain names have completed 1,800 transactions, with the highest transaction amount for the domain name "gm.sats," which was sold for 0.125 BTC.

Pure numeric domain names are particularly sought after by players, such as "896.sats" which sold for 0.1 BTC, and "04.sats," "988.sats," and "8848.sats" which all sold for 0.05 BTC. In recent days, five pure numeric domain names have seen significant transactions, with prices ranging from 0.0002 to 0.0005 BTC.

Regular NFTs

Regular NFTs here refer to the "small images" that everyone is familiar with, such as PFPs, Art, etc. In this track, we can select potential NFT projects from four angles.

"Big Brand Positioning" NFT Projects

This refers to NFT projects issued on the Bitcoin network that are blue-chip projects from ETH and Solana, such as Yuga Labs' "TwelveFold" and the Bitcoin version of DeGods.

These projects already have significant influence, so their sale prices are also high. Yuga Labs' "TwelveFold" sold 288 NFTs through an auction, with the highest bid at 7.1159 BTC and the lowest bid at 2.2501 BTC, generating approximately $16.5 million in auction revenue. Currently, on ordinals.market, the floor price of "TwelveFold" exceeds 30 ETH, with a cumulative transaction volume of 108.49 ETH. DeGods sold 500 Bitcoin version DeGods for 0.333 BTC within 2 minutes.

Yuga Labs' "TwelveFold"

Bitcoin version of DeGods

Since there are no smart contracts on the Bitcoin network, it remains unclear how these "big brand positioning" NFT projects will empower themselves in the future. An interesting detail is that Yuga Labs carefully used the term "Inscribe" during the sale process, while DeGods still used "Mint."

Although it is just a small difference in wording, it has completely different meanings for Bitcoin NFTs—there are actually no NFTs on Bitcoin; what we call NFTs are simply different contents written onto different Satoshis. Since no new tokens are being "minted," the term "Mint" is not applicable.

"Sub 10K"

Each inscription (Bitcoin NFT) has an inscription number, and the earlier the minting time, the smaller the number. Therefore, NFTs with numbers below 10,000 and 100,000 are given a layer of "antique" significance. Although these early inscriptions often lack thematic content, they are speculated based on "time" value.

Currently, the 2nd and 8th Bitcoin NFTs minted—Inscription #2 and Inscription #8—have been listed on the Ordinals Wallet market.

Inscription #2 and Inscription #8

Currently, the highest transaction price for a "Sub 10K" Bitcoin NFT is Ordinals Punk #87 (Inscription #613), which sold for 2.77 BTC. On March 17, the Bitcoin logo image Inscription #3384 sold for 0.31 BTC. Influential "Sub 10K" series include Ordinals Punks, Bitcoin Shrooms, and Planetary Ordinal, while the familiar Bitcoin Punks belong to the "Sub 100K" category.

Shovels

This refers to NFT series that continuously receive valuable airdrops after holding. Currently, a well-known "shovel" is BTC Machine, which has subsequently airdropped two projects: BTC Operators and BTC Virus. Currently, the floor price of BTC Machine in the Ordinals Wallet market is 0.088 BTC, while the floor prices for BTC Operators and BTC Virus are 0.018 BTC and 0.0012 BTC, respectively.

BTC Machine

A more noteworthy perspective is that using various Bitcoin NFT-related tools may likely lead to airdrops of "shovels." Ordinals Wallet airdropped 1,563 sad frog-themed pixel PFPs—"Pixel Pepes"—to its early users at the end of February, and the current floor price for this series is 0.066 BTC.

As the largest Bitcoin NFT trading market by transaction volume, the value of Pixel Pepes largely stems from the expectation of "shovels." Since the current Bitcoin NFT-related tools offer overlapping functionalities, it is very likely to attract traffic by airdropping NFTs to users. Therefore, from now on, everyone should pay attention to interacting more with Bitcoin NFT-related tools. (Recommended reading: "Overview of Practical Tools in the Bitcoin NFT Ecosystem")

Pixel Pepes

Native Memes

Bitcoin NFTs represent a nascent market. In this early stage, many project ideas are directly borrowed from ETH NFTs, such as Punks, Toadz, Apes, etc. However, if we hold high expectations for the long-term development of the Bitcoin NFT market, Bitcoin's blue chips must distinguish themselves from ETH NFTs in terms of underlying logic and gameplay, developing their unique narrative and artistic routes.

Meme culture has always been an important part of NFT art, and there is a rich Meme heritage in Bitcoin's native culture. The currently hottest Bitcoin NFT project, Taproot Wizards, is a manifestation of Bitcoin's native Meme culture. (Recommended reading: "An Analysis of Bitcoin memeNFTs: What Does the Bald Wizard Taproot Wizard Pay Tribute to and Express?")

Additionally, another important element of Bitcoin's native Meme culture is "pizza," and there is now a project called Ordinal Pizza OG related to "pizza."

Conclusion

At this stage, the investment logic of Bitcoin NFTs has not shown significant differences compared to ETH NFTs. Since players interested in NFTs mostly come from ETH, projects that have accumulated some traffic on ETH can more easily succeed when migrating to Bitcoin.

Most Bitcoin NFT projects in the cold start phase have also adopted mechanisms such as whitelists and Paid Mint (paid minting) from ETH. Just like the once-popular Solana NFT market last year, influential whales sensed the opportunity and rushed in to "position" themselves, leading their forces to take a bite out of the new attention economy pie.

However, in the long run, if we believe that Bitcoin NFTs will develop into a market that rivals or even surpasses ETH NFTs, Bitcoin NFTs must and will develop their uniqueness from the perspectives of artistic content, cultural logic, etc., forming a unique "circle culture" within the Bitcoin NFT community.

The elements of Bitcoin's native Meme culture, the long-standing fair and pure value formation process of Bitcoin (for example, Free to Inscribe should be the norm, as centralized project parties do not have the power to price Bitcoin. The value formation of Bitcoin is a long-term decentralized aggregation process), combined with the artistic creations that have accumulated over time, will lead to the emergence of new Bitcoin NFT blue chips.

In fact, there are no NFTs on Bitcoin; 1 Satoshi = 1 Satoshi is an eternal value equation, and the Ordinals protocol grants us the right to freely explore the diversity of Bitcoin's value. The market will set prices and judge the value of all experiments exploring the diversity of Bitcoin's value. In the medium-term outlook, the author hopes that Bitcoin can provide more opportunities for small and medium creators through the coolest artistic cultural carriers.