新篇章：创业投资——铭文生态之下，能否开启崭新赛道？

铭文新叙事：从生态赋能到开创新赛道的Ventures？

来源：Kernel Ventures Stanley

TL;DR: Hey there, digital asset investors! Today, we’re diving into the fascinating world of Bitcoin inscriptions and exploring the trends and features of various protocols. Get ready for a wild ride as we compare Ordinals, BRC20, Atomical, RGB, and Pipe to other Pow chains like Dogechain and Litecoin, as well as Ethscriptions and Evm.ink on the Ethereum chain. We’ll be looking at factors such as fees, divisibility, scalability, and user experience, with RGB standing out as the low-fee, high-scalability superhero.

The Background of Inscription Market: Let’s start with the boom that happened after the launch of the Ordinals protocol in January 2023. BRC20 and Ordinals assets caused a frenzy on the Bitcoin chain, earning the title “the realm of retail investors”. These inscriptions gained popularity due to the Fair Launch model, where tokens were minted solely by retail investors themselves, with no institutions, project teams, or insider trading involved. The cost of minting an Ordi inscription was around $1, but after being listed on the Gate exchange, it skyrocketed to $20,000! Talk about an insane increase! This surge in popularity brought in a horde of Ordinals players, leading to a continuous rise in gas fees on the Bitcoin chain. Gas fees reached an all-time high of 400 s/vb, breaking previous records.

Now, let’s dive into a deep analysis of the various inscription protocols on different chains.

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Bitcoin Chain: Ordinals / BRC20 Protocol: In January 2023, Bitcoin developer Casey Rodarmor introduced the Ordinals protocol, which allows metadata to be engraved on the Bitcoin chain and given a unique inscription number. In March of the same year, Twitter user @domodata released the BRC20 protocol, which turned token minting into a string-based process on the chain. The BRC20 flagship token, $ORDI, was listed on Binance on November 7th, propelling its value to soar by almost 100% in a single day.

Although Ordinals was the first protocol in the inscription ecosystem, it also had its fair share of issues, such as the limitation of supporting only four-character tokens and being susceptible to smart-contract attacks and redundancy on the Bitcoin network. This redundancy issue was caused by the fact that once an inscription was minted, the original inscription became invalid, leading to data congestion. However, some early Bitcoin geeks hesitated to support Ordinals due to this reason.

Atomical Protocol: Atomical’s ARC20 protocol uses a single Satoshi to represent deployed tokens and removes the limitation of four-character tokens, allowing for more diverse use cases. Realm, a unique project built on Atomical, assigns value to prefixes, with each registered Realm having pricing rights over all suffixes. Realms can be used for various purposes, such as payment addresses (PayNames) and building communities, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), identity verification, and social profiles. Eths and Atomicals are still in the early stages, waiting for wallet and market improvements.

Pipe Protocol: Rune, a token implementation method specifically for issuing FT, was proposed by Casey, the founder of Ordinals. It directly writes Token data in UTXO scripts, including Token ID, output, and quantity. While Rune was just a concept, Trac’s founder developed and launched PIPE based on this concept. PIPE quickly gained momentum, thanks to Casey’s reputation, and became the continuation of BRC20 hype. Rune has stronger legitimacy than BRC20, but its acceptance within the BTC community remains challenging.

RGB Protocol: As Ordinals elevated the Bitcoin network’s ecosystem, more developers and projects turned their attention to the Lightning Network due to its low fees and 40 million TPS (transactions per second). RGB is an intelligent contract system based on BTC and the Lightning Network, providing the ultimate scalability solution. However, due to its complexity, RGB’s progress has been slow. It turns a smart contract’s status into a concise proof, embedding this proof in the BTC UTXO’s output script. Users can verify the UTXO to check the contract’s status. As the contract’s state changes, a new UTXO is created to store the proof of state change.

RGB is an L2 solution for BTC, leveraging BTC’s security to guarantee smart contracts. With the increased adoption of inscriptions, developers will increasingly explore RGB’s smart contracts, which are written in Rust and are not compatible with Ethereum. RGB’s low fees and high scalability make it an attractive option in the Bitcoin network, opening up new possibilities for Bitcoin DeFi.

Other POW Chains: While Bitcoin inscriptions were dominating the market, other Pow chains also saw inscriptions migrating to their platforms. Let’s take a look at Dogechain and Litecoin, which have gained market acceptance and completed development.

Dogechain: The Drc-20 protocol on Dogecoin’s chain is based on the Ordinals protocol, offering similar functionalities to the Bitcoin chain. However, Dogechain gained popularity due to its low transaction fees and strong meme culture.

Litecoin: Similarly, LTC20 is the Ordinals-based protocol on the Litecoin chain. Litecoin’s official team and founder, Charlie Lee, promoted and endorsed the protocol. Unilit and Litescribe are the leading trading markets, and Litescribe’s wallet development is already well advanced. However, the protocol faced some issues, such as the indexing bug and lack of divisibility. But those were fixed later.

Ethereum Chain: Ethscriptions: Ethscriptions is an Ethereum scaling solution proposed by Tom Lehman on August 8th. It utilizes inscription technology similar to Ordinals and extends it using Calldata to achieve low-cost gas fees and high-dimensional application of the Ethereum mainnet ecosystem. This is Eths in a nutshell.

Eths’ core is the Ethscriptions Virtual Machine (ESC VM), which is similar to Ethereum’s EVM. The “Dumb Contracts” within the ESC VM allow Eths to break free from being only an NFT and enter the realm of functional and practical applications. It also enters the competition between the base layer and L2 solutions. However, challenges remain, such as the lack of divisibility for inscriptions and the need for further development.

Other EVM Chains: Evm.ink: Evm.ink takes the Ethscriptions protocol standard to other EVM chains, allowing them to mint inscriptions and build their indices. Popular projects like POLS and AVAL use Evm.ink (Ethscriptions) for indexing and identification. These projects have gained significant traction, indicating that users are interested in low-cost Layer 2 inscriptions. Gas fees on chains like Heco and Fantom have also surged due to the popularity of inscriptions on those chains.

Solana Chain: SPL20: Solana inscriptions started on November 17th, with a total of 21,000 inscriptions minted. Unlike other networks, the main body of inscription on Solana is the NFT, with the Index Content being the inscription itself. The inscription’s validity depends on both the image hash and the built-in text hash. The image data is off-chain, while the text data operates on-chain. Currently, the main platform for inscriptions is IPFS, and some platforms also use AR. Solana inscriptions, like Eths, face the challenge of divisibility. Without divisibility, they essentially remain NFTs, lacking liquidity and convenience for Dex swaps.

With the Solana inscriptions, Tap, the founder of TapPunk on the Tap protocol, proved their creative minds. The Liberplex team, the largest inscription platform, has been actively developing features like hash indexing and immutable attribute changes. The Tensor marketplace has also successfully integrated Solana inscriptions. The first inscription, $Sols, had a minting cost of around $5 and reached a high of 14 SOL in the secondary market. The trading volume exceeded 20,000 SOL or approximately $1.2 million in a single day.

Core Comparisons: Let’s take a look at the key features and comparisons of the core protocols.

Comparison of Core Protocols: In the provided image, we compare the main inscription protocols based on fee rates, divisibility, scalability, and user count. RGB stands out with its low fees and high scalability, thanks to its integration with the Lightning Network and its smart contract capabilities.

Other POW Chains: While other Pow chains, such as Dogechain and Litecoin, are also based on UTXO models like Bitcoin, they face similar challenges in terms of divisibility and scalability. RGB, being an L2 solution, holds promise for scalability. However, EVM chains, such as Ethereum and Evm.ink, attract more users due to their inherent low gas fees and lower entry barriers.

Solana Chain: Solana inscriptions face similar challenges as Eths regarding divisibility. However, the Liberplex team and the Tensor marketplace have been making significant progress and are actively developing and improving the infrastructure.

The Future of the Inscription Ecosystem: Market Predictions: Galaxy Research and Mining predicts that by 2025, the market value of the Ordinals market will reach $5 billion, with only 260,000 inscriptions. With the current count already at 33 million inscriptions, that’s a growth rate of 126 times in just six months. The current market value of $ORDI is already at $400 million, and $Sats stands at $300 million. It’s clear that the growth potential of the entire inscription market is severely underestimated.

Product Predictions: Currently, BRC20 activities are concentrated on OKX and UniSat. OKX’s user-friendly Web3 wallet has provided an excellent experience for BRC20 asset trading, and UniSat’s innovative BRC20-Swap allows users to easily exchange BRC20 tokens like an AMM DEX. UniSat has the potential to unlock the power of the Bitcoin DeFi ecosystem, paving the way for future functionalities like lending and derivatives. Moreover, UniSat has opened API access to small developers, enabling the creation of various tools and projects.

Racing Track Predictions: As funds flow into the inscription market, users are no longer satisfied with meme-based hype and are shifting their focus to inscription-based applications. UniSat’s innovations and the growing number of inscription protocols indicate that this market is expanding beyond fair launches.

Bitcoin’s EVM presents a promising narrative. For example, BEVM is a Bitcoin L2 solution based on Ethereum’s network, where native tokens are BTC. It allows users to cross over BTC to BEVM through official cross-chain bridges and enjoy the compatibility of EVM on the L2 chain. The challenge here lies in maintaining decentralization and avoiding token inflation. Furthermore, the synchronization of transactions to the Bitcoin network and proactive protection against sequencer attacks are topics that should be addressed.

In conclusion: This article provides a comprehensive analysis of the development trends and features of various inscription protocols in the Bitcoin ecosystem. By comparing Ordinals (BRC20), Atomical, RGB, Pipe, and other Pow chains, as well as Ethscriptions, Evm.ink, and Solana’s SPL20 protocol, we shed light on the differences in fee rates, divisibility, scalability, and user experience. Divisibility is still a bottleneck, and RGB stands out as the most well-rounded protocol with great potential. We also discussed the market background and inscriptions’ impact on gas fees in the Bitcoin network. In the future, the inscription market is expected to continue its robust growth, providing more opportunities for investors and participants alike. With the emergence of more innovative projects and protocols, the inscriptions’ ecosystem on Bitcoin and other public chains will be further enriched. Miners may also enjoy increased profits as the inscription ecosystem provides new revenue opportunities.

So buckle up, digital asset investors! The world of inscriptions is vibrant, innovative, and full of potential. Are you ready to be a part of this exciting journey? Share your thoughts with us below!

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Disclaimer: This is a rewritten article, and the views expressed in this article do not represent financial advice or investment recommendations. Always do your own research.

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