Why Bitcoin's adoption of Ordinals and BRC-20 is saving it from irrelevance

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Nic Carter from Castle Island Ventures and Elizabeth Olson, an Ordinals educator, discussed how the adoption of Ordinals and BRC-20 is saving Bitcoin from irrelevance in a recent panel titled “Bitcoin Renaissance” at Consensus, which took place today.

“I would actually argue to say that Ordinals and these fungible token standards, like runes, these are actually saving Bitcoin,” Olson said. 

She pointed out that Bitcoin Ordinals, alongside runes and BRC-20, have incurred over $160 million in fees paid to miners, helping to secure the Bitcoin network.

Olson also mentioned the potential of OP_CAT, a protocol proposed by Satoshi Nakamoto himself, which could bring recursive covenants and a permissionless bridge with a two-way peg to Bitcoin by the end of the year.

Carter argued that Bitcoin’s success is not predetermined and that it needs to adapt to stay relevant. 

“Bitcoin changes at an extremely slow rate. We don’t even know how to make changes now,” he said. 

Carter believes that small incremental changes to Bitcoin, such as adding new opcodes like OP_CAT and Zk, could massively enhance its usability.

When asked about investments in the Bitcoin space, Carter mentioned that Castle Island Ventures is an investor in Babylon and three other Bitcoin L2s. He cautioned that while there has been a surge of interest in Bitcoin L2s, some projects may be opportunistic and lack the technological enabling factors to deliver on their claims.

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