The Bitcoin Ecosystem Explosion and Hidden Gems in the Inscription Craze🤑🤑🤑

A month ago, I published an article: The BTC Ecosystem: The New Wild West for Blockchain Developers. I posted it on Medium, Hackernoon, and Twitter, but it was largely ignored.

As we all know, in crypto, alpha often lies in information and knowledge gaps. I immediately realized this was a niche area not many people were paying attention to yet, full of money-making opportunities. So, on December 8th, I published another tutorial on How to Mint $cook

Regrettably, this high-value tutorial was also ignored. People probably did not realize what they had missed. Because today, the leading BRC-20 protocol tokens, $ordi, and $sats, have already exceeded $1 billion in market cap. As the first implementation of the Rune protocol (Rune Alpha), the value of $cook is self-evident.

On December 8th, when I minted this token, although it was a fair mint for free, Bitcoin network gas fees were still very high, with gas for minting once (1000 $cook) reaching $20, plus $2 collected by the project team. So the cost of minting one rune (1000 $cook) was about $22 back then. Each $cook costs around $0.022.

Today (December 14th), although the project team has not opened trading on markets yet, I checked some OTC WeChat and Discord groups. The current trading price has reached $0.5 per $cook. Once the team enables market trading, I believe it will quickly reach around $1 (50X). Even at that price, $cook's market cap would still be less than $200 million. Compared to the market caps of $ordi and $sats, the two leading BRC-20 protocol tokens, it's not exaggerated at all.

But please note, I'm not publishing this today telling you to buy $cook after market trading opens. Because there are so many opportunities in this market now, you really don't need to FOMO. Actually, today, I want to discuss some projects with even higher upside potential with you.

Main Problems in the Current Bitcoin Ecosystem and Possible Solutions

If you pay close attention, you’ll notice we’ve already entered an alternative DeFi summer. On the Bitcoin network, gas fees are abnormally high almost every day, like today. For a simple transfer transaction, if your gas fee is below $30, it will likely get stuck unconfirmed.

This is because people are minting BRC-20 tokens, Rune tokens, and tokens of other protocols you’ve probably never even heard of on the Bitcoin network. If you find these concepts confusing and have no idea what’s going on, you can refer to my intro article.

This may feel familiar because we saw something similar on the ETH network back in 2017 when issuing tokens first emerged as a major use case. Back then, countless competing protocols (blockchains) sprang up from ETH, filled with scammers and adventurers, and many get-rich-quick myths emerged. Together with Bitcoin’s halving, this led to the great bull market that year.

Today, in 2023, 7 years later, I seem to be seeing the same landscape again. But in my previous article, I also mentioned what I believe to be the Bitcoin ecosystem’s main problem compared to the ETH ecosystem — Bitcoin’s scripting language is not Turing complete, so it cannot be used to write smart contracts. Bitcoin does not have an EVM like ETH, nor does it have smart contracts, so naturally, it cannot maintain state on-chain.

If you are a developer, you surely understand what I mean. Not being able to maintain an on-chain state means there is no way to use token standards and interfaces like ERC20, let alone build various DeFi applications based on smart contracts. So, how can we enter a DeFi summer?

Also, in that article, I mentioned some possible solutions — building decentralized oracles on the Bitcoin network (a field Chainlink has not yet ventured into), distributed and open-sourced Indexing service solutions, and integrating both to form a state management framework compliant with relevant fungible token protocols.

I did not come up with these solutions out of nowhere. They are based on existing solutions in the market, plans of institutions in this field, and some projects they are working on. In that article, I provided the links to the L1 Foundation and BRC-20 documentation.

I believe most people, even those hyping $ordi and $sats now, did not actually read these documents carefully. The indexing section of the BRC-20 doc clearly identifies some existing indexing providers.

In addition, it explicitly tells everyone that Alex Lab is leading the creation of a Bitcoin oracle, “In short, this intends to validate the indexer’s global state against each other every block, and attest their coordination on-chain via Stacks.”

Analysis of Related Projects

To make an imperfect analogy, in this Bitcoin DeFi summer, if Casey, who created Ordinals, is Vitalik, then people like Domo and Benny are like the earliest Ethereum core developers. They are pushing the entire Bitcoin ecosystem towards explosion based on Ordinals theory.🚀🚀🚀

If the current inscription craze is akin to the ICO craze sparked by the emergence of the ERC20 standard in the 2017 bull market, then perhaps next year, we will see a real DeFi summer in the Bitcoin ecosystem.

When we think about what happened between the 2017 ICO craze, the 2021 DeFi summer, and the 2022 metaverse explosion, it’s not hard to see that it was the development and improvement of various infrastructures in the Ethereum ecosystem that led to this dramatic change. (Readers who truly understand this paragraph, I believe its value to you definitely exceeds $1 million.)🔮🔮🔮

This field is still exploding and developing rapidly, but some situations are becoming clear. L1 Foundation has become the largest startup gang in this space, with Domo as their godfather. This camp contains the two largest tokens in BRC-20 and even the entire Bitcoin ecosystem right now — $Ordi and $Sats (their market caps have exceeded $1 billion).

From the Brc-20 documentation, we can see other core and peripheral members of this startup gang. You can even find all of them on the L1 Foundation forum. For example, Best in Slot, Unisat, Benny, and Alex Lab. These teams all have more or less connections and collaborations with L1 Foundation. I believe they are the most powerful group of people in the Bitcoin ecosystem’s wild westward movement right now.👨‍💻👨‍💻👨‍💻

Let’s go through these projects one by one🏆🏆 🏆

Best in Slot currently has no token or plans announced. If it continues to have no token later, I’m inclined to believe it has joined Unisat’s ecosystem and will use $Sats.

Unisat is strong, but $Sats already has a $1B+ market cap. For me, I may prefer higher odds, and smaller market cap projects.

OKX has its own token $OKB, with a very large market cap. It’s a typical CEX token, a bit like $BNB, not a native Ordinals inscription or BRC-20 token. I don’t think it belongs to this ecosystem.

Hiro is a bit like Alchemy on the Bitcoin network, actually a developer platform. But like Best in Slot, it currently has no token either.

$TRAC is Benny’s project. In addition to indexing services, it has built a huge ecosystem, including its own token protocol and exchange. In the Bennyverse, besides $TRAC there is also $PIPE and $-TAP, the only cursed inscription in the Ordinals ecosystem.

Alex Lab has its own token $ALEX, which surged rapidly in price recently as more investors realized its value. It has been corrected in the past couple of days.

Of these projects above, the ones I must obtain and enter quickly are Benny’s projects and Alex Lab’s projects. Because they both have the potential to become super infrastructures and behemoths like Chainlink in the Bitcoin ecosystem; after all, we are still in a period similar to the 2017 ICO craze; the real DeFi summer has not arrived yet!

Some may argue Unisat is strong, but $Sats already has a $1B+ market cap. For me, I may prefer higher potential returns and smaller market cap projects.💎💎💎

$TRAC currently only has a $120 million market cap, $ALEX less than $200 million. Compared to $Sats’ over $1 billion market cap, their potential returns are obviously much higher with the same upside. Meanwhile, I don’t think the probability of success for Benny’s projects and Alex Lab’s projects is necessarily that low either.

They are also not mutually exclusive relationships. Chainlink reached an astonishing peak market cap of $22 billion last bull market. I think all these early projects still have a long way to go. 😁

Since you’ve read this far, please give me a like for the insights and thoughts! If this gets enough likes, I will share more #gems💎 in the future.👍👍👍