To sort out the key projects of BTC ecology, it is enough to read this article
Original editor: Crush, Biteye core contributor
Original editor: 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
image description
image description

(Figure: Weekly transaction volume trend, https://studio.glassnode.com/metrics?a=BTC&category=Transactions&m=transactions.Count&resolution=1 w&s=1230508800&u=1684800000&zoom=)
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
image description

(Picture: The top five NFT series with the largest trading volume in all time)
image description
(Figure: Top 5 NFT series with the largest trading volume in 30 days, source: https://www.ordinalhub.com/price-tracking?dateRange=All&page= 1&sort=volume_btc% 3 Adesc)
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 0.09 2B TC.
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 10 K, because each Bitcoin NFT has an inscription serial number, and Sub 10 k is the earliest 10 k Bitcoin NFT in Mint time, with early value, Ordinals Punks is Sub 10 One of the series in k.
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.
image description
(Data source: https://brc 20 insider.com/global)
image description

(Data source: https://chaineye.tools/)
ORC-20: Since the BRC-20 standard has these three major problems:
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) BRC 20'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.
image description

(Data source: https://loveords.com/orc 20 )
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-scale consensus, and there are relatively few users.
image description

(Data source: https://www.stampscan.xyz/)
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) InscriptionManifest (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 @0x Jerry 543, with a total of 1 k pieces and a floor price of 0.077 BTC.
04 L2 and side chain 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.
image description
(Data source: https://mempool.space/lightning)
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 block generation speed so that transactions can be confirmed quickly. According to the description in its white paper, the block generation speed can reach 4-5 s;
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 SBTC, the original asset 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. There was a wave of growth at the beginning of this year (coin prices rose and BTC Ordinal narrative), and then fell sharply. Compared with 2022, Only slight growth.
image description

image description
side chain
side chain
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 28.31 M, while the TVL of ALEX is 26.7 M, 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.
image description
(Data source: https://defillama.com/protocol/alex?tokenVolume=true&volume=true&denomination=USD&groupBy=daily)
Arkadiko
Arkdadiko is the protocol with the second largest TVL in the Stacks ecosystem, with a TVL of 6.9 M (data source: https://info.arkadiko.finance/). Arkdiko 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
06 Summary
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.


