Ordinals Launches NFTs On Bitcoin, Unsurprisingly Sparking Controversy – Decrypt

When it comes to digital collectibles, most enthusiasts think of Ethereum, Solana, or Polygon—deservedly, as proof-of-stake blockchains have cornered the NFT marketplace. But digital collectibles using the Bitcoin blockchain have existed since 2014, and several projects have made it their continuing mission to bring NFTs to the first and biggest cryptocurrency.

NFTs are digital assets that are provably unique and linked to digital (and sometimes physical) content like digital art, movies, and music that show proof of ownership or membership in an exclusive group.

Even though NFTs have been in the Bitcoin ecosystem for nearly a decade, however, some still don’t see the point.

One of these projects is Ordinals, and some Bitcoin maximalists are calling it an affront to Bitcoin principles.

Ordinals creator Casey Rodarmor takes the criticism in stride, saying the controversy helps his cause.

“I actually love the haters,” he said. “I mean, they do more to drive people to find out about the project than anybody else. I don’t know what they think when they have these massive audiences, and they go, ‘This is an attack on Bitcoin’—it seems like you don’t want to do that if you don’t want people to use the thing.”

Rodarmor is a former Bitcoin Core contributor who designed Ordinals to allow the transferring of individual satoshis on the Bitcoin network. “The Ordinals protocol is just a system for numbering Satoshis, giving individual sats a serial number, and then tracking them across transactions,” Rodarmor told Decrypt in an interview.

The Ordinals protocol enables users to explore, transfer, and receive individual satoshis, which may include unique inscribed data such as vi