On Tuesday, the creators of Ordinals declared they formed a nonprofit organization in California named the Open Ordinals Institute to support the development of their protocol for assigning NFT-like assets to the Bitcoin blockchain. This announcement coincided with the total inscriptions surpassing 21 million.
Launched earlier this year by developer Casey Rodarmor, Ordinals rapidly became a center for innovation around Bitcoin by enabling users to allot data like art, profile pictures, or playable games to individual satoshis, which are 1/100,000,000 of a Bitcoin.
The new nonprofit will fund the protocol’s core developers, including the pseudonymous lead maintainer Raph, to continue its advancement.
Raph informed Decrypt that forming a nonprofit allows accepting donations and allocating capital to contributors impartially, without profit motivations. He added that transitioning to a nonprofit structure will mainly impact taxes. Pending IRS approval, Ordinals’ development team, previously funded privately by Rodarmor, can receive tax-deductible donations rather than personal gifts.
Raph stated the Institute’s board will likely comprise four people – himself, Rodarmor, Hell Money podcast host Erin Redwing, and the pseudonymous Ordinals technical fellow Ordinally.
Raph likened this to other crypto projects creating foundations but admitted the effort remains in the initial stages, describing it currently as an extremely simple, minimalist structure.
Coinciding with this shift, the Ordinals team launched Ordinals.org to share community updates, resources, and information related to the project’s development from the organization’s members.
This new direction follows Rodarmor stating that in May he would be stepping back, explaining he could not dedicate adequate time to Ordinals. However, Rodarmor has remained active in the project’s GitHub repository for developing and refining features, with changes as recent as June 19.
On Tuesday, the total Ordinals inscriptions surpassed 21 million, per a Dune Analytics dashboard, a significant milestone considering Bitcoin’s total supply is permanently capped at 21 million.
Enthusiasm around Ordinals inscriptions and Bitcoin transaction fees spiked in May amid surging demand for experimental BRC-20 tokens built on Bitcoin using Ordinals, inspired by Ethereum’s ERC-20 tokens.
The increased Bitcoin fees generated concerns but ultimately provided miners a substantial windfall, which MicroStrategy’s Michael Saylor previously stated could benefit Bitcoin long-term.
As excitement around Ordinals expanded, crypto exchanges and NFT marketplaces hurried to support art inscriptions and BRC-20 tokens. However, lately, trading volume related to Ordinals inscriptions noticeably declined, per Ordinally.
Ordinally told Decrypt that while some claim Ordinals is dead, his discussions with software companies building in this space suggest the slowed activity offers a welcome chance to refocus.
According to the Dune Analytics dashboard, on June 2, nearly 22,000 transactions involving art inscriptions occurred on Ordinals-supported marketplaces, an all-time high. Yesterday, that figure was under 2,000.
Ordinally said they were initially attracted to Bitcoin’s digital scarcity and finite nature amid abundant digital noise. They view Ordinals as extending Bitcoin’s scarcity to art and collectibles with ample room for growth.
In their opinion, digital artifacts utilizing Bitcoin’s scarce block space will evolve over time into something quite different from today’s NFT ecosystems. While only initial steps have been taken, there is tremendous potential for further development.
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