As or writing, there are nearly 54 million Inscriptions.
A cursory look at an Ordinals explorer will demonstrate that most of these Inscriptions are worthless–and possibly dangerous–depending on how you look at them.
Regardless, Ordinals have probably brought in a new cohort of users to the motherchain–many of which first used Ethereum, Solana or countless other L1 alternatives that popped up in 2021.
The question now is about audience capture: How do we secure the hot ball of money to stay on Bitcoin and not rotate to the next Ethereum gadget? What cements Bitcoin’s dominance as the NFT chain? Probably the Bitcoin ETF. BlackRock alone has $2 billion of capital lined up for its fund, mostly from Bitcoin money, which will certainly catalyze additional capital moving into Bitcoin. Capital begets capital.
Post-first purchase, the next step for many a Bitcoin adherent is a laser eyed podcast. But this tribe of Bitcoin is hostile to ETF money, even if they desire the ETF pump. Which brings us to Ordinals: a welcoming community in Bitcoin with a proven track record of delivering digital first products.
Provenance is defined as “the place of origin or earliest known history of something.” It’s a common term within NFT circles to help define one jpegs value against others. With new money coming into Bitcoin, the provenance of certain Bitcoin NFTs will only increase as a status symbol, similar to CryptoPunks as Udi puts it in this Tweet thread. Ordinals both attract new entrants and give them a backstage pass.
So yes, there’s a lot of spam. But for every 1,000 inscriptions there’s one blue chip for new money to bid up indefinitely.
