Inventory of key BTC ecological projects

Inventory of key projects in Ordinals NFT, BRC-20, L2 and side chains, and DeFi.

Written by: Lucky, Biteye Core Contributor

Edit: Crush, Biteye Core Contributor

The BTC ecology has been hot for two months, but with the callback of ORDI, many people began to worry that this wave of BTC ecology boom is over, so let us first use the data to see if this ecology is worthy of continued attention?

At the same time, this article brings you an inventory of key ecological projects one by one.

01 Recent Status of BTC Ecology

From the number of daily active addresses of BTC, it can be seen from the data of Glassnode in the figure below that the number of active addresses on the BTC chain has shown an upward trend from the beginning of the year to the present, and the transaction volume has also shown a sharp increase. From the current From the perspective of BTC’s ecological activity, the decline in the price of ORDI has not led to the weakening of activities on the chain. It can be seen that the ecology is still very viable.

*(Figure: Trend of weekly active addresses, source: *

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*(Figure: weekly trading volume trend, *

So when the BTC ecology is still hot, what projects should we pay attention to? Let's take stock of some projects worthy of attention in the BTC ecology.

The categories are as follows: (you can jump to the category you are interested in to browse)

1. Ordinals NFT project

2. Introduction of BRC-20 project and other standards

3. L2 and side chain projects

4. DeFi projects

02 Ordinals NFT Project

The Ordinals protocol is a system for numbering Sat (Satoshi). Orninals tracks them in transactions by giving each Satoshi a serial number. At the same time, users can attach additional data (images, videos, texts, etc.) to Bitcoin blocks through Ordinals. On the chain, so that each Satoshi is unique and has the nature of NFT.

(Picture: The top five NFT series with the largest trading volume in All time)

Judging from the total transaction volume of Ordinals NFT in the above figure, the top five are Bitcoin Punks, Bitcoin Frog, Pixel Pepes, Bitcoin Apes, DeGods. From the perspective of the transaction volume in the past 30 days, DogePunks and Naked Bitcoin Frogs Misprints also Breaking into the fifth list, let us introduce these projects one by one:

(Figure: Top 5 NFT series with the largest trading volume within 30 days, source:

1. Bitcoin Punks is the first project derived from the CryptoPunk on Ethereum using the Ordinals protocol. It has successfully transferred the CryptoPunk on Ethereum to the NFT project of Bitcoin. The current floor price is 0.0068 BTC.

2. Bitcoin Frogs is composed of 10,000 generated frogs, free mint, no roadmap and airdrops, the founder is anonymous, famous for the narrative of Meme, and has a wide spread. The current floor price is 0.092BTC.

3. Pixel Pepes is an Ordinals Wallet airdrop project on February 28, with a total of 1,563 pieces. The airdrop condition is to use the wallet to trade at least once before block 777888. The airdrop has ended, and the current floor price is 0.164 BTC.

4. DeGods is an NFT project on Solana that was released on the Bitcoin network in March. The NFT series has a total of 534 pieces (because 534 pieces were destroyed on Solana before, so it is planned to be reissued on the Bitcoin network), of which 500 will be used for Bitcoin minting at a price of 0.444 BTC, and another 34 DeGods will be used for auction/lottery in the form of DUST tokens with a current floor price of 1.07 BTC.

5. DogePunks is a Bitcoin Ordinals project that combines the concepts of Dogecoin and CryptoPunks. The total number is 10,000, and the current floor price is 0.0166 BTC.

6. Naked Bitcoin Frogs Misprints is a project derived from an error in the clothing layer when Bitcoin Frogs was released, which resulted in some frogs not having clothing layers and pictures of naked frogs appearing. It has meme attributes and discussions, so it is also very popular. Currently The floor price is 0.0203 BTC.

7. At the same time, there are also projects worthy of attention: Sub 10K, because each Bitcoin NFT has an inscription serial number, and Sub10k is the earliest 10k Bitcoin NFT in Mint time, with early value, Ordinals Punks is one of the series in Sub10k .

03 BRC-20 project and other standards

The BRC-20 standard is based on the Ordinals protocol, which realizes the deployment, minting and transfer of tokens by writing information such as the token name and total amount into Satoshi in a standardized JSON format.

From the BRC-20 trading volume trend shown in the figure below, it can be seen that the popularity of BRC-20 has continued to rise. Even though the top $ORDI has fallen by more than half, the impact on its trading volume is small. It can be seen that people's Attention and funds have not been withdrawn too much from the BRC-20 ecology.

(Data Sources:

From the Chaineye tool website, it can be seen that the top five BRC-20 market capitalizations are ORDI, OXBT, OG, VMPX, and BISO. The following editor lists these tokens and some other tokens worthy of attention:

(Data Sources:

ORC-20: Due to these three major problems in the BRC-20 standard:

1. The supply of tokens and the maximum amount of minting cannot be changed, which limits the development of tokens;

2. Token naming is limited to 4 digits;

3. BRC20's "Inscribe Transfer" and "bookkeeping" heavily rely on external centralized indexing services;

In order to solve the above problems, the ORC-20 standard came into being. ORC-20 canceled the token naming restrictions, added the upgradeable function of the token, and allowed the project party to do more empowerment based on the token. At the same time, advanced functions such as setting royalties and setting white lists have been added.

The current mainstream ORC-20 tokens are as follows:

(Data Sources:

However, because the infrastructure of ORC-20 has not yet been fully developed, and the wealth effect is still concentrated on BRC-20, ORC-20 currently receives very limited attention.

SRC-20: In addition to BRC-20 and ORC-20, SRC-20/21 has also attracted some attention. SRC-20/21 is a token standard developed based on the Stamps protocol. BTC Stamps was invented by @mikeinspace. He and The biggest difference between Ordinals is that the image/text information of Ordinals is stored in the witness data, while the Stamps data is stored in the transaction output. This difference creates an important feature of Stamps, that is, it can always exist on the BTC chain, and all nodes must synchronize the data .

Compared with ORC-20, the infrastructure development of SRC-20 will be more complete, but at present, there is still no trading market that has reached a large consensus, and there are relatively few users.

Although Stamps has a trading market, the process experience is not as smooth as the BRC-20 trading market. According to the recent announcement of Hiro Wallet, SRC-20 tokens will be integrated to allow users to view assets more conveniently. With the foundation of this standard The facilities are perfect and perhaps deserve more attention.

(Data Sources:

BRC-721: BRC-721 is a standard similar to the Ordinals protocol, but currently the Ordinals protocol lacks a way to classify NFT items into a specific collection, so it relies more on the accounting and retrieval of centralized service providers.

The emergence of BRC-721 is to solve the creation and verification of decentralized NFT collections. The BRC-721 protocol is based on three types of lists:

1. CollectionManifest (collection list)

2. InionManifest (list of inscriptions)

3. RevealManifest (reveal manifest)

Each manifest has protocol and version fields, allowing third-party services to understand the specification for API integration and query, and thus build appropriate applications.

At present, the development of this standard is in a relatively early stage, and it is worthy of tracking and attention. The more well-known projects now include Ordibots issued by @0xJerry543, with a total of 1k pieces and a floor price of 0.077 BTC.

04 L2 and sidechain projects

With the increasing number of transactions on BTC, how to use the underlying security of BTC and allow BTC to carry more transactions has become one of the current development directions. At the same time, as the halving is approaching, the problem of miners' income is gradually increasing. emerge.

However, due to the limitation of BTC blocks, the attractiveness of a single block reward to miners' future income may be limited. For the long-term development of BTC, two types of solutions have emerged, namely BTC L2 and side chain solutions.

Next, we will introduce the selected key projects for you:

L2

Lightning Network

The Lightning Network was proposed by Joseph Poon and Tadge Dryja in 2016. It is one of the Bitcoin Layer 2 solutions. The Lightning Network consists of payment channels, designed to achieve fast and low-fee transactions, allowing users to pay off-chain, but without Confirmation, the final settlement is carried out on the main chain, theoretically the Lightning Network can reach the processing speed of millions of transactions per second.

The following is the development of the payment channel of the lightning network. It can be seen that the capacity on the lightning network has maintained a high growth trend after 2022, and the number of channels has increased significantly in 2021-2022, and in 2022 - Not much growth in 2023.

(Data Sources:

Stacks

The technical architecture of Stacks includes the core layer and the main network. Developers can choose one of them for development. At the same time, the Stacks verification mechanism adopts the POX (Proof of Transfer) consensus algorithm, adopts the method of anchoring transactions, and packages the transactions , to broadcast the transaction block information on the Stacks chain to the Bitcoin network to ensure the security of its transactions.

Stack has a complete execution environment (that is, any application that can be built on a chain such as Ethereum can be built on the Stacks layer).

Transaction verifiers and miners in Stacks can pledge $STX and $BTC to mine $BTC and $STX tokens to maintain network security.

From the perspective of the Stacks roadmap, the launch of the Nakamoto network and the release of SBTC in Q4 this year will be an important milestone in the development of Stacks, which deserves special attention.

The possible effects of these two major updates are as follows:

1. Stacks transactions can obtain the final confirmation of Bitcoin, increasing the security on Stacks;

2. Increase the speed of block generation, so that transactions can be confirmed quickly. According to the description in its white paper, the speed of block generation can reach 4-5s;

3. Support subnet custom development language, that is, subnet can support other programming languages and execution environments (such as Solidity of Ethereum);

4. The introduction of the original asset SBTC on the chain makes it more possible to establish a financial ecology in BTC L2.

Judging from the development of Stacks in the figure below, the number of its daily active addresses is currently less than 4k. At the beginning of this year, there was a wave of growth (coin price increase and BTC Ordinal narrative), and then fell sharply. Compared with 2022, only There is micro growth.

Compared with the 200,000 DAU of the popular ETH L2 Arbitrum, the gap is still large. Although its TVL growth is good, its total TVL amount is still low, which shows that the ecology is currently in a relatively small stage in terms of users and funds.

*(Figure: Number of daily active addresses, source: *

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(Picture: Changes in Stacks TVL)

Sidechains

Rootstock

RSK is a Bitcoin sidechain project developed by the company IOV Labs. It adopts the Bitcoin mining algorithm. Bitcoin miners can perform "merged mining" when mining, and at the same time, they can obtain the transaction procedures in Rootstock fee income.

The native token in Rootstock is a bitcoin-anchored currency rBTC. At the same time, the company has also developed RIF (Rootstock Infrastructure, the token is $RIF), a platform built on Rootstock, which aims to provide developers with a community Blockchain infrastructure and services, including domain names, storage, authentication, etc., to support the development and deployment of dApps.

Liquid Network

Liquid Network is a Bitcoin sidechain developed by Blockstream to provide faster, cheaper, and more secure transaction services. It supports transactions of cryptocurrencies and assets, and provides functions such as confidential transactions and batch transactions.

05 DeFi Projects

ALex

Alex is currently one of the most important protocols on Stacks. As of May 29, the TVL on Stacks is 28.31M, while the TVL of ALEX is 26.7M, accounting for most of the TVL on the chain.

At present, Alex has the functions of mainstream DEX, Swap/Add Liquidity/Stake, but in addition, due to the popularity of BRC-20, Alex has also developed a Beta version of BRC-20 transactions.

The Beta version uses the order book model, which is currently available to users (with poor liquidity). In addition to trading, Alex also supports Launchpad to help other projects issue initial tokens. However, due to the current ecosystem on Stacks Not rich, so both the transaction volume and the performance of Launchpad are mediocre.

However, with the gradual development of the ecology on Stacks, Alex, as the head DEX on the ecology, will also become a beneficiary and develop simultaneously.

Judging from the transaction volume and TVL of Alex in the figure below, since March, the project has gradually attracted attention, and the transaction volume and TVL have increased greatly.

(Data Sources:

Arkadyko

Arkdadiko is the protocol with the second largest TVL in the Stacks ecosystem, with a TVL of 6.9M (data source: It is a protocol similar to Maker DAO.

The stable currency USDA is minted by over-mortgaging STX. At the same time, the project also supports SWAP and Lending. Currently, there are only 7 trading pairs that can be used for SWAP, and there are three types of assets that can be borrowed, namely STX, xBTC, and ALEX.

As an early project on Stacks, it is also the largest lending project. In the process of ecological development, if such projects can keep up with the development of the ecology, they have the opportunity to occupy the top position and obtain the dividends of ecological development.

MoneyOnchain

MoneyOnChain is a decentralized bitcoin-backed stablecoin protocol built on RSK. Its transactions require RBTC as a service fee. Users can mint stablecoin DOC by mortgaging rBTC. At the same time, $BPro is issued, a kind of A leveraged product based on BTC.

06 Summary

This article introduces some standards and projects in the BTC ecology. For the BTC ecology, BRC-20, SRC-20 and BRC-721 are some standards worthy of attention. In terms of L2 and sidechain projects, Lightning Network, Stacks, Rootstock are some important projects. When it comes to DeFi, Alex, Arkadiko, and MoneyOnChain are some protocols to watch.