The Ordinals protocol is viewed as a hindrance to Bitcoin by some, but others are more confident in its position regarding nonfungible tokens (NFTs) within the Bitcoin ecosystem.With traders growing increasingly interested in NFTs based on Bitcoin, OKX’s NFT marketplace overtook its rivals on December 18 in terms of daily trading volume.The company said on January 29 that it will be adding Atomicals and Runes to its marketplace, further intensifying its efforts to accommodate Bitcoin NFTs.To further explore supporting Ordinals in other chains, it will also incorporate Dogecoin’s Doginals.Aside from its marketplace, OKX also declared that its Web3 Wallet would handle Atomicals, Stamps, Runes, and Doginals’ token standards.
Although OKX publicly backs both Bitcoin protocols and Ordinals, other participants in the Bitcoin ecosystem have made it clear that they don’t like Bitcoin Ordinals—some have even gone so far as to call them digital spam.Chief innovation officer Jason Lau of cryptocurrency exchange OKX, on the other hand, isn’t convinced.
on an interview with Cointelegraph, Lau claimed that on open, permissionless networks like Bitcoin, “spam” does not exist.As long as the fees are paid and the transactions follow the established guidelines, the executive thinks that all transactions are legitimate. He continued.“Historically, OKX has been a strong supporter of the Bitcoin ecosystem, being one of the earliest to support upgrades like SegWit, Taproot and Lightning, and Ordinals are no different.”
The executive also argued that Ordinals and inscriptions can open up new use cases for users and provide a new design space for developers. “Inscriptions have the potential to be powerful digital collectibles as they store data and art on-chain and allow for new types of NFTs to be created.”
Sixteen blockchains—Arbitrum, Avalanche, Cronos, zkSync, and The Open Network—went through complete or partial outages on December 19.This resulted from a flurry of transactions caused by users writing inscriptions on other networks that resembled Bitcoin Ordinals.Regarding the possibility of inscriptions causing blockchain clogs, Lau referred to these as “growing pains.”In the early stages of adoption, these are unavoidable, according to the CEO.According to Lau, resolving such problems is “normal” and would happen eventually.
“While it’s still early stages for the inscriptions ecosystem, we see a unique opportunity for inscriptions to grow as we expand our support beyond just BRC-20 to include emerging standards like Atomicals, Stamps, Runes and Doginals,” Lau explained.