Good News and Bad News for NFTs and Ordinals

TL;DR

• Put simply, BRC-721E lets NFTs that were originally minted on Ethereum move over to the Bitcoin network.

• In order to move NFTs from Ethereum to Bitcoin, they need to be sent to a ‘burn’ address (permanently destroying them), and the same data is then recreated on the Bitcoin network.

• Innovation continues in the Web3 space, even though this functionality is a bit half-baked.

Full Story

We have good news and we have bad news.

The good news (and the major insight for this article) is that this is another classic case of innovation continuing in the Web3 space.

The bad news: well, the innovation is kinda half-baked.

All the talk this year has been about the Ordinals protocol.

They’re like NFTs on the Bitcoin network, allowing people to store pictures, text (and more), on Bitcoin rather than a purpose-built network like Ethereum or Solana.

And on Monday, the number of Ordinals in existence hit 10M!

Today’s innovation comes in the form of a random collection of letters and numbers: the ‘BRC-721E’ token standard.

Put simply, BRC-721E lets NFTs that were originally minted on Ethereum move over to the Bitcoin network.

Ready for the kinda half-baked part? Once moved, it’s permanent.

In order to move NFTs from Ethereum to Bitcoin, they need to be sent to a ‘burn’ address (permanently destroying them), and the same data is then recreated on the Bitcoin network.

So, as we said, innovation continues in Web3 – heck, until January this year Ordinals didn’t even exist!

While this is a one-way road for now, I’m sure it’s not too far in the future before Ordinals are able to be sent over to the Ethereum network.