Bitcoin started investing in NFTs since its major taproot update in 2021 that introduced Bitcoin ordinals protocol to their blockspace. As explained on this platform, this involves the minting or inscribing of satoshis or sats which is the smallest bitcoin unit. It is probably important to note that one bitcoin has 1 million sats and the process of minting sats involves inscribing of sats with ordinal serial numbers and small packets of data in the form of images or art of a maximum size of 4MB per sat. This is what basically forms the Bitcoin’s NFT blockspace and it is imperative to observe that the bitcoin NFTs are hosted in the same blockspace and does not require a token from a provider that is hosted on another network.
According to galaxy digital, during a recently concluded study, the bitcoin NFTs marketplace is set to hit a record $4.5 million market cap in a period of the next 2 years. The industry expert has alluded this to the growing interest in the NFTs. With digital art selling a record prices in the recent past, it is safe to say that a lot of people have shown interest in this sector which was accelerated by the release of web3 that makes all of these technologies available to both users and web3 developers.
Dune Analytics released data showing that at least 323 000 inscriptions have been minted since the release of the ordinals protocol almost a month ago. This massive activity in adoption of the ordinals that is responsible for bitcoin NFTs has seen Yuga labs release its own collection on the platform.
According to Galaxy Digital researchers, the estimates were arrived at based on various factors like the analysis of how big the market could be based on Etherium’s NFT market growth in the past few years. The analysts also researched the top 5 best selling NFT collections in order to arrive at the estimates.
It is important however to note that there are notable differences between on-chain inscriptions and other regular NFTs for instance Etherium NFTs. Galaxy is skeptical to note that this record market cap can only be achieved if these Bitcoin NFTs can infiltrate the mainstream NFTs projects involving art, memes, collectibles and even exclusive content like music albums and playlists. Galaxy further notes that the figure could hit $10 billion is the ordinals manage to infiltrate the NFTs market space.
The analysts also concluded that in the event the Bitcoin NFTs do not infiltrate the marketplace, they could still pry some market share from Etherium NFTs and still make $1.5 billion.
As is the norm, this sector is extremely competitive with large companies throwing their weight on the next big thing. The technology underlying NFTs is still new and under constant progressive development both in the developer community as well as the enterprise roll outs of the technology for public use by stakeholder enterprises. This in itself is a good thing since a healthy competition forces companies to ensure quality and reliability in order to achieve the uniqueness required to capture a sizeable market share. Expect more in the coming days.
