This could be the most forgotten protocol in crypto history
Counterparty put assets and NFTs on Bitcoin in 2014
9 years before Ordinals
No premine
No ICO
People burned ~2,125 BTC into an unspendable address and got ~2.65M
$XCP back
Founders got nothing
Robby Dermody, Evan Wagner and Adam Krellenstein built a metaprotocol that lives inside normal Bitcoin transactions
Day one they already had a fully onchain DEX
Bitcoin Core then cut OP_RETURN to 40 bytes so they had to use bare multisig and got blamed for UTXO bloat
Mastercoin raised ~4,740 BTC in a crowdsale
Counterparty just set BTC on fire and kept building
After years quiet, core came back in 2024 with a full rewrite
By 2026 they’re shipping AMM pools and inscription-style metadata on Bitcoin again
Everyone acts like Bitcoin assets started with Ordinals
They didn’t