Everyone’s caught Ordinal fever and is having fun with Bitcoin NFTs. Here’s what I think will happen:
- All of the activity right now is from: (1) tinkerers experimenting with new tools available to them and (2) crypto speculators trying to grab a piece of what they believe is going to be a valuable historical artifact in the future. The “historical artifact” thesis has some merit, in my opinion. In the NFT world, we have placed an outsized level of importance on an object’s historical provenance.
- Intuitively, the only type of NFTs which make sense on Bitcoin are store-of-value NFTs such as high-quality art. The programmability of Ordinal NFTs is minimal compared to other blockchains, severely limiting their use cases.
- I expect the Ordinals hype to simmer down once the rose-tinted glasses are removed and people realize that the use cases today are limited to PFPs/static art.
- Once the hype dies down, it’s crunch time. Are there enough builders on Bitcoin who actually want to create innovative things using these NFTs? The next wave of users will come only IF someone builds something truly novel on it.
