The eruption of inscriptions has expanded Bitcoin from a peer-to-peer electronic cash system to the most valuable NFT infrastructure.
Due to being entangled in the setting of basic tenets and the peer-to-peer electronic cash system, early attempts to build NFT projects on the Bitcoin network mostly ended in failure. Fortunately, Ethereum perfectly took over the NFT narrative, ushering in a grand NFT Summer wave and further catalyzing the accelerated integration of Web3 and the real economy. However, the first NFT wave eventually came to a halt with the arrival of the bear market and fell into long-term silence. As time passed and the market fluctuated, the NFT market entered a phase of recovery, and the positioning of Bitcoin NFT and Ethereum NFT also experienced a two-tier reversal.
After the Bitcoin Taproot upgrade and Segwit expansion, more data can be stored on the chain. Ordinals, created by Casey Rodarmor, allows for the numbering and writing of text, images, videos, and other data using Bitcoin's smallest unit, satoshis (SATS). NFT assets can be minted, transferred, and destroyed in SATS transactions, officially unveiling the inscription narrative with the arrival of the bull market. Compared to Ethereum NFTs, Bitcoin NFTs are directly stored on the chain, with a fairer distribution mechanism, higher decentralization, and security, and bring higher value to the Bitcoin network. However, the Bitcoin network does not have Ethereum's Turing-complete smart contract functionality, so Bitcoin NFTs do not support complex custom settings and have limited storage space. Nevertheless, the Bitcoin ecosystem has already broken ground and is moving towards NFT infrastructure. During the peak period, the 24-hour trading volume of BTC NFTs once surpassed that of Ethereum's ETH.
As Bitcoin NFTs and inscription narratives continue to evolve, the NFT market landscape has also been changing rapidly. The OKX NFT market was the first to respond to user demand and launched the OKX Ordinals market, quickly establishing a presence in the market. According to Dune data, on January 30th, the OKX Ordinals market accounted for 89.3% of the market share, with a total transaction volume exceeding $1 billion, making it the largest BRC20 inscription and BTC NFT trading market in the industry. In addition, the OKX NFT market will also integrate standards such as DRC-20 and ARC-20 by the end of February, continuing to lead the construction of the Bitcoin inscription ecosystem. Furthermore, in addition to Bitcoin inscriptions, the OKX NFT market also supports inscriptions from the Aptos and Solana ecosystems, accelerating their rise in the NFT market.
With the rise of inscription narratives, NFT users' attention has shifted from Ethereum to Bitcoin
Once dominant NFT projects such as BAYC, Azuki, and CryptoPunks, were unable to sustain their high values in the bear market and eventually regressed to the mean. The PFP, art, and equity narratives they advocated have become old stories. At the same time, the "one superpower, many strong" pattern in the NFT market has quietly changed. Some NFT leading platforms have adhered to the status quo, while some emerging NFT platforms have risen in the midst of market changes.
In 2023, the Bitcoin inscription narrative ignited the market, shifting NFT users' attention from Ethereum to Bitcoin. Market capital flows began to be active, and the leading Bitcoin NFT project, Bitcoin Frogs, surpassed the Ethereum NFT leader BAYC in daily trading volume multiple times, sparking a grassroots movement to "redefine fairness" from the bottom up in the community. However, Bitcoin's lagging infrastructure cannot meet the gap in user demand. As a platform with technological accumulation and innovation, OKX NFT was the first to launch the Ordinals market, responding to user demand in a timely manner and experiencing exponential user growth. According to Dune data, as of January 30th, the Ordinals market had reached 138,704 users, accounting for 89.3% of the market share, with a total transaction volume exceeding $1 billion, ranking first in the industry.
The OKX Ordinals market is completely decentralized, with no platform service fees, and supports a one-stop transfer, trade, and inscription of BRC-20 and BTC NFT, and has introduced powerful inscription tools that support users to batch inscribe with a single signature. The BTC network can inscribe 1200 transactions at once, while the EVM network can automatically inscribe 50 transactions at once. Users can choose between text mode or hexadecimal mode and batch inscribe single or multiple texts on BTC and 23 mainstream EVM chains, automatically sending user transactions without the need to import private keys, making it more secure and convenient. In addition to batch inscriptions, the OKX Ordinals market also supports batch purchases and transfers, allowing simultaneous purchases of BRC-20 inscriptions and BTC NFTs, with a maximum of 10 transactions per purchase, eliminating cumbersome steps and improving transaction efficiency.
The cost of minting Bitcoin NFTs is related to data size and minting speed. To address the two major challenges of "expensive" and "congested" interactions on the Bitcoin chain, the OKX Ordinals market further reduces user GAS costs by optimizing UTXO spending order and, during processes such as placing orders and purchasing, avoids users being maliciously stuck with low GAS through encrypted PSBT signatures, disabling RBF transactions, and server-side broadcasting. In terms of UTXO management, the OKX Ordinals market supports the prevention of invalid UTXO spending and smart unlocking of invalid NFTs, as well as invalid BRC-20 and BRC20-S inscriptions, helping users to release them with one click.
In addition to continuously meeting the growing user demand, the OKX Ordinals market continues to empower industry development through measures such as open source and API upgrades. The API function now supports faster order placement through the API, with zero fees and better depth and liquidity. The comprehensive open-source OKX ORD Indexer not only supports Ordinals protocol parsing and transaction events, inscription data, UTXO status queries, but also supports BRC20 protocol parsing and transaction events, balance, ticker queries, and bitmap protocol parsing, thereby continuously building the Bitcoin ecosystem.
The eruption of Bitcoin inscription narratives has driven the prosperity of inscription ecosystems on major public chains. To more comprehensively support the development of the inscription industry, the OKX NFT market has gradually begun to support recursive inscriptions, cursed inscriptions, BRC-420 standards, Solana inscriptions, and Aptos inscriptions trading, and will integrate ARC-20, SRC-20, Runes, and DRC-20 inscription token standards, becoming the first and most advanced one-stop inscription ecosystem platform in the Web3 industry. It is evident that behind these diversified measures, millions of users can conduct zero-cost transactions in the expanding world of inscription standards, and help OKX NFT become the largest inscription market in the industry. The decline of the old NFT narrative has led to the rise of new platforms, gradually dismantling the "one superpower, many strong" NFT landscape dominated by Opensea, and multiple new forces have begun to diversify, ushering in a new era of inscription warfare, where the brave emerge victorious.
Three core driving forces, OKX NFT market's accumulation and breakthrough
The OKX NFT market covers separate NFT sections, the Ordinals market, and the Drops section. Its rapid rise in the inscription battle is largely attributed to its long-term meticulous product development. Dappradar data shows that the 24-hour trading volume of the OKX NFT market has repeatedly topped the industry, even achieving counter-trend growth in the bear market. Through in-depth experience and community research of the OKX NFT market, it is not difficult to find that its rise is mainly attributed to three core driving forces: solid infrastructure construction, rich and diverse functions, and product innovation.
In terms of infrastructure construction, the OKX NFT market has taken a dual approach. On the one hand, it has simplified users' cross-chain transactions by integrating Ethereum, zkSync, Polygon, Arbitrum, and other EVM networks, as well as Solana, Aptos, Sui, and Starknet heterogeneous chains. On the other hand, it continuously aggregates orders from multiple platforms such as Tensor, OpenSea, Magic Eden, LooksRare, IMX Official, Element, Blur, and others to provide users with the best quotes and liquidity. As of now, the OKX NFT market has integrated 20+ public chains and 30+ NFT platforms, and with the continuous expansion of its integration scale, the number of users is on the rise, especially in new chain ecosystems such as Aptos and zkSync.
Based on the best depth and smooth cross-chain experience, the OKX NFT market also supports multi-dimensional intelligent user interaction strategies, multi-dimensional security strategies, API standards, and ecosystem construction, further enhancing the user experience. For example, the launch of the multi-dimensional intelligent user interaction strategy feature supports users to simultaneously place multiple orders on the OKX NFT market or Opensea, requiring only one authorization signature, and intelligently selects the contract call method at the time of purchase based on user needs to maximize reducing user operation processes and gas consumption. The multi-dimensional security strategy feature allows for multiple checks when recording NFT projects, automatically identifying fake projects and false airdrop tokens, and blocking and processing them to help users avoid gas and asset losses. In addition, the OKX NFT API now supports the collection and commodity retrieval of the entire chain, as well as the retrieval of all chain orders and order trading instructions, which can be used for free without permission and is currently adopted by Element, Bybit Web3, AICoin, and TG BOT. Through the construction of the API ecosystem, the OKX NFT market will closely cooperate with more developers and high-quality project parties.
In terms of diversified functions, the OKX NFT market provides rich functions for NFT target search, data reference, trading processes, and experiences, helping users better filter and trade in a massive NFT market. The search function of the OKX NFT secondary market supports collection, commodity, and user address dimensions, and provides filtering functions for authentication, chain dimensions, and more, allowing users to have a more comprehensive understanding of NFT targets. In addition, the OKX NFT market also provides data visualization functions such as displaying popular collections, trading rankings, price and trading volume, trading scatter plots, order depth charts, and portfolio diversification, allowing users to make decisions more quickly and scientifically. In terms of the trading process, it fully supports convenient basic functions such as batch order placement, order price adjustment, collection bidding, accepting bids, batch transfers, and can pre-execute to intercept user transactions to avoid on-chain asset losses.
In terms of innovation, the OKX NFT market also supports batch creation and editing of collections, and has launched AI creation functionality. Through batch creation, whether ordinary users, artists, or project parties, they can upload 10,000 image works with a single click and generate their own NFT collections and independent NFT contracts without needing to understand or learn complex and obscure contracts and technologies. In addition, users can create art works through AI or upload existing art works, in addition to generating art works through text descriptions and uploaded images, there are also dozens of new art styles to choose from, greatly enhancing the quality and experience of creation.
In addition to the NFT section and the Ordinals market, the OKX NFT market also has a very eye-catching Drops section. The Drops section is the exclusive primary issuance platform of the OKX NFT market, completely decentralized and fair. By selecting popular high-quality NFT assets, on the one hand, it allows users to participate at discounted prices in a timely manner. In addition, it also cooperates irregularly with high-quality project parties, such as exclusive giveaways of whitelist with Nobody and TinFun, helping users better seize profit opportunities.
As a zero-fee multi-chain aggregation platform that integrates creation, collection, and trading functions, the OKX NFT market, through a deep understanding of user real needs and meticulous product development, has exerted efforts from three strategic levels of infrastructure construction, diversified functions, and product innovation, and has ultimately grown into one of the most comprehensive and advanced NFT markets in the industry.
Innovation continues, NFT opens up endless possibilities
Under the influence of the digital wave, the NFT market has also experienced an unprecedented prosperity and innovation, gradually becoming the dominant force in global digital art, gaming, and virtual asset trading, presenting rich appearances in multiple fields. Looking back, the NFT digital artwork "Everydays: The First 5000 Days" by artist Beeple was auctioned for $69 million on the Christie's network, Yuga Labs' metaverse project Otherside sparked a 3-hour gas war, and BTOK purchased the most expensive bored ape BAYC #7537 for 1024 ETH, continuously refreshing users' understanding and pushing NFTs to an epic climax.
But ultimately, the NFT narrative could not be sustained for the long term, and all the prosperity faded into the silence of the crypto winter. During the long process of mean value regression of NFT value, users were mixed with frustration and anticipation. In 2024, with the eruption of the Bitcoin inscription narrative, the NFT market warmed up and the landscape also underwent tremendous changes. The multi-chain aggregation platform OKX NFT market, which was the first to respond to user demand, stood out with its excellent product experience and comprehensive advanced functions, winning widespread support and trust.
Bitcoin NFT has just started, and narratives on networks such as Aptos and Solana are also rapidly iterating. With the continuous upgrading and improvement of infrastructure represented by the OKX NFT market, the future market evolution is full of interest. Although the sustainability of the inscription wave cannot be predicted, the innovation of NFT will go far beyond this. Whether it is the exploration of digital art, gaming, asset rights, on-chain identity, or the combination with real estate, the immutable nature of blockchain guarantees transaction transparency and security, driving the development and boundaries of the crypto world. But as technology continues to develop, the NFT market will continue to usher in more innovation and change, becoming an indispensable part of the digital age.
For example, the NFT market can improve transaction speed and reduce costs by widely adopting Layer2 solutions, and provide users with a richer social experience by NFTizing social media. Overall, in a balanced progression of technological innovation, industry compliance, and societal acceptance, NFT will continue to play a key role in the crypto industry and is expected to find new paths of development in the ever-changing environment, bringing more innovative experiences to crypto assets. As users, by maintaining exploration and experience, they can see the future of NFTs earlier.
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