在 2023 年，比特幣銘文經歷了從無到市值接近 30 億美元的歷史性發展。比特幣銘文禁用風暴將礦工、交易所和開發者三方算計的賽局帶到了全新的境地。接下來，讓我們用 15 張數據圖來回顧這段激動人心的歷程。
首先，Ordinals 協議的推出打開了比特幣生態的潘朵拉魔盒。該協議賦予每個聰獨特的序列號，並允許使用者在聰上銘刻附加資訊。這些銘文可以儲存在比特幣錢包，並在比特幣交易中追蹤，具有不可篡改和去中心化的特性。至今已有超過 5700 萬個比特幣銘文，貢獻了超過 2.3 億美元的費用。
接著，Ordinals 協議在 2023 年 2 月 9 日首次亮相，Bitcoin Punks 成為第一批使用該協議的 NFT。Bitcoin Punks 在不到兩天的時間內全部鑄造完成，引起了廣泛討論。此後，BRC-20 協議的推出進一步推動了比特幣銘文的發展，誕生了數萬種銘文代幣。
OKX 作為最早進入銘文市場的主流中心化交易所，利用其技術儲備和服務資料的穩定性，成為銘文板塊中的龍頭。OKX Web3 錢包成為銘文使用者的首選，交易量和市場份額持續增長。
然而，BRC-20 在 2023 年 9 月末到 10 月中下旬遭遇了最大危機之一，一個名為「Sophon」的狙擊機器人導致鏈上鑄造數降為零。Sophon 機器人利用 BRC-20 部署機制和交易的公開性，將其他代幣程式碼廣播為「官方」，使鑄造活動停滯。幸運的是，Sophon 機器人最終關閉並捐贈給開源軟體。
ORDI 作為首個上線的 BRC-20 代幣，經歷了從公平發射到數萬倍漲幅的驚人發展。ORDI 和 SATS 先後在 OKX 和 Binance 上線，顯示了交易所對銘文資產的積極態度。
銘文活動也在各大公鏈上展開，對其進行了「壓力測試」。銘文敘事在 2023 年 12 月 16 日推動了比特幣交易費用的歷史新高，顯示了其對礦工收入的潛力增長點。
儘管面臨外部和內部的危機，比特幣銘文的生態發展不可忽視。銘文代幣的多樣化和潛力將繼續推動比特幣生態的發展。讓我們期待更多精彩的銘文故事！
Luke Dashjr, a Bitcoin Core client developer, submitted PR #28408 to the Bitcoin Core Github in September 2023, which updates “datacarriersize” to filter out transactions carrying script data like “memes”. On December 6, 2023, Luke criticized on social media that “memes” were exploiting a vulnerability in Bitcoin Core to launch spam attacks on the blockchain, and he hoped that the bug could be fixed before the release of v27 in 2024. Luke classified the fiery memes as a Bitcoin bug and was determined to fix it, becoming the biggest external crisis faced by the Bitcoin meme protocol at the time.
The debate over the inclusion of memes in PR #28408 continued for a month among Bitcoin developers on the Bitcoin Core Github, with hundreds of intense discussions. At the same time, various forces representing miners, developers, communities, and users engaged in heated debates on social media. However, due to significant differences in opinions, it was difficult to reach a consensus. Bitcoin Core maintainer achow101 believed that the PR was controversial and ultimately closed it on January 5, 2024. Thus, the external crisis of the Bitcoin meme protocol came to a temporary end. During this period, the meme asset ORDI, although affected in the short term, still rose by nearly 35% overall and reached a historical high.
Further reading:
Bitcoin memes sentenced to death? Core developer vows to fix the vulnerability next year, BRC-20 may disappear!
Internal crisis: BRC-20 founder domo and UniSat, the largest indexer, disagree on consensus.
BRC-20 is based on the Ordinals protocol but is not native to the Ordinals protocol. When the Ordinals protocol is upgraded, BRC-20 faces the question of whether its index should follow the upgrade.
Indexing is the essence of consensus. In order to maintain the stability of the index, domo froze BRC-20 at version ord v 0.9 in November 2023. However, with the development of the Ordinals protocol, issues like the previously unidentifiable cursed memes have been fixed, bringing many new features. This puts the BRC-20 frozen at ord v 0.9 in a difficult position.
On January 3, 2024, UniSat, which has the largest consensus on the market, chose to upgrade BRC-20 to follow the Ordinals Jubilee, contradicting the original intention of BRC-20 founder domo. Domo criticized UniSat for forking BRC-20. The “stabilization faction” led by BestinSlot and domo of Layer 1 Foundation and the “upgrade faction” led by UniSat and Ordinals Wallet formed two opposing forces in the BRC-20 issue. One side was the creator, and the other side was the largest consensus. BRC-20 faced an unprecedented internal crisis.
Although there were disagreements, the intentions behind BRC-20 were good. Through friendly communication between the two sides, domo and UniSat reached an agreement on January 5, two days later, to have BRC-20 follow the Ordinals upgrade. OKX and Binance also supported the BRC-20 upgrade following the Ordinals protocol. Although the crisis was resolved in a short period of time, it made people realize that assets derived from the Ordinals protocol in the early stages of development are prone to consensus splits.
The diversity of Ordinals meme asset types cannot be ignored.
Although text-based memes, led by BRC-20, dominate the meme types, other types of meme assets have never stopped developing and still have a niche in the market.
From Bitcoin Punks to Bitcoin Frogs to NodeMonkes, image-based assets represented by NFTs have maintained a steady development trend. The fully on-chain and immutable nature of NFT collectibles has returned to the essence of NFTs. 3D model-based assets represented by BRC-420 Blue Boxes showcase the imagination of building a metaverse on Bitcoin. On January 23, 2024, the number of model meme assets minted reached a historical high of 61,000. Building applications on Bitcoin has become a reality.
The highly anticipated Runes protocol proposed by the founder of Ordinals.
Due to the adverse consequences of BRC-20 causing a significant increase in UTXOs, Casey, the founder of the Ordinals protocol, publicly criticized BRC-20 on social media on September 25, 2023, and proposed a new tokenization standard protocol called Runes. Runes balances are recorded and stored by UTXOs, and a single UTXO can contain any number of Runes. Compared to BRC-20, UTXO-based Runes are more in line with the native characteristics of Bitcoin, reducing the harm caused by UTXO set expansion and the risk of consensus fragmentation due to external index dependencies.
The “official version” of the Runes protocol, proposed by Casey, is scheduled to go live during the next Bitcoin halving. However, the vision of Runes has already been realized in some grassroots protocols, such as Rune Alpha, which has deployed COOK Rune tokens, and the PIPE Protocol introduced by meme laborer Benny, which has given birth to PIPE and other Rune tokens. RSIC’s new mining gameplay also produces some kind of Rune tokens that will be available after the Runes protocol goes live.
Atomicals protocol based on the UTXO model showcases its potential.
In September 2023, Arthur introduced the Atomicals protocol, an improved protocol based on the Bitcoin UTXO model. It has a GPU Bitwork mining mechanism and defines three types of native assets: NFTs, ARC-20, and Realms. ARC-20 is a colored satoshi-backed token standard, with each ARC-20 token backed by 1 satoshi. Because it is more closely aligned with the Bitcoin ecosystem, Atomicals is considered by the community to have the potential to succeed Ordinals and usher in a new era of meme ecology. Due to its similarity to the fundamental unit of matter, Atomicals has formed a physical MEME culture led by ATOM, with most other ARC-20 tokens also named after physical terms. On January 1 and January 21, 2024, the forging activities of QUARK and SOPHON drove Atomicals to surpass Ordinals in terms of daily minting and deployment numbers.
Airdrops to Bitcoin degen players may become commonplace, RSIC’s first high-value airdrop.
On January 22, 2024, RSIC airdropped to 9.27k addresses, including active addresses in the Ordinals and holders of blue-chip BTC NFTs. The total supply of RSIC is 21,000, and the current floor price exceeds 0.036 BTC (around $1,500). This is the first time a meme project has conducted a high-value airdrop as a cold start, and it may become more common to airdrop to active Bitcoin players in the future.
Bitcoin scaling path exploration, BTC L2 sees an explosion.
According to statistics from the BitVM Chinese community, there are currently over 30 publicly available BTC L2 solutions, which can be classified into sidechains, off-chain computations, Rollups, data availability, state channels, client verification, and others based on their characteristics. Sidechains include BEVM, MAP Protocol, and Merlin Chain, while Rollups include QED Protocol, BitVM, and Bison. Data availability solutions include Veda and Nubit, state channels include OmniBOLT and the Lightning Network, client verification includes RGB, and others include Bool Network, Dovi, and Bitfinity Network. It is expected that there will be over 100 BTC L2 solutions in this cycle.
In just one year of meme development, various protocols and asset types have emerged. However, for most early-stage protocols, the infrastructure for indexing and data is not yet well-established, and I also have limited data mining capabilities for certain protocols, so I apologize for not being able to mention all of them.
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