The latest developments in the Bitcoin ecosystem

Recently, two dynamics in the Bitcoin ecosystem have attracted the attention of many people and are believed to be expected to boost the recent weak inscription market.

One is that there is a new proposal for the BRC-20 protocol; the other is that Casey, the founder of Rune (also BRC-20), said that the market value of Rune will reach 1 billion within a month.

In this new proposal for the BRC-20 protocol, it allows deployers to enjoy the rights of token minting, that is, to be able to set their own interests; in addition, it adds support for 5-character named tokens.

For a long time, whenever we mention BRC-20 tokens, we always think of the fairness of the protocol and no pre-mining - even token deployers have no privileges, and if they want to obtain tokens, they must deposit coins on the chain like all participants. This feature has contributed greatly to the establishment of BRC-20 tokens today.

However, this feature has also been criticized by some project teams, so this change in the new proposal reconsiders the interests of the project team.

This change will definitely cause a wave of controversy, but I think it will have no impact on project parties that are truly willing to conduct a fair sale. It just provides the entire ecosystem with an additional option, which may not be a bad thing.

As for the protocol adding support for 5-character named tokens, the first thing many people think of is which names among the 5-character tokens may be worth hyping, and they are ready to participate in the related hype.

As the BRC-20 ecosystem has developed to this day, the stage where strong consensus can be accumulated simply by relying on the naming concept has passed, so adding support for 5-character tokens will make it difficult to produce a coin with a strong consensus like ORDI.

Therefore, in my opinion, this BRC-20 protocol update is nothing new. At most, it will cause a small stir and then return to calm.

What impressed me most recently about the Rune ecosystem is the continuous airdrops, which are too numerous to keep up.

Every now and then when I open my wallet, I see some weird new stuff, and then I go to Magiceden to see what it is, and then I find out that they are all related to runes.

Judging from these airdrops, these project owners have spent a lot of money to pay for handling fees. These project teams are empowering Rune with real money and are vigorously operating the Rune ecosystem.

I remember that during a Twitter exchange in March, many listeners asked me which protocols in the Bitcoin ecosystem I was more optimistic about?

My answer at the time was that when the ecosystem has developed to this stage, it is no longer possible to judge which protocol has a better future based on technology alone. What is more important is to look at the operation of the ecosystem and see which protocol can quickly build the ecosystem first. Once the market and hot spots are occupied by a certain protocol, other protocols will be meaningless no matter how advanced they are in technology, as they will have become obsolete.

At that time, I felt that other than BRC-20, the performance of other protocols in the ecosystem was similar. But looking back now, I feel that the development of the Rune ecosystem has been significantly faster, at least in terms of atmosphere and momentum, it is stronger than many competitors.

However, some protocol communities do not seem to realize this yet. They continue to emphasize their own advanced technology, but have not taken any substantive actions to quickly transform their technological advancement into ecological advantages.

As for the bold statement made by the founder of Rune that he would increase the market value to XXX, he even posted a picture of suicide by seppuku on Twitter, which is really a bit exaggerated.

Such remarks made by the founder, especially those specifically targeting the market value, will definitely have potential negative impacts on the development of the ecosystem.

I have never seen in Satoshi Nakamoto’s historical speeches how big he wanted Bitcoin’s market value to be, nor have I seen Vitalik confidently say how big Ethereum’s market value would be.

As for the recent weakness of the inscription ecosystem, I am not worried at all. When the market truly enters a bull market, the rotation of sectors will definitely come.

We don't need to care about the present, and we don't need to keep an eye on whether there will be any news that stimulates the market every day.