Routes 2 and 3 are missing one key piece: native programmability.
With OP_CAT covenants, Ordinals can support founder incentives, holder rewards, cheaper airdrops, and better self-custody, all secured by Bitcoin without relying on workarounds.
Bitcoin is great for securing digital assets. OP_CAT can help build a stronger ecosystem around them.
The BTC ecosystem really exploded because the narrative and product market fit were genuinely excellent. Onchain art on the worlds most secure network just makes sense
It was such a strong narrative that it attracted massive cross chain attention. It had so much motion it fueled a fungible meta with much weaker pmf
To see a move to that extent, I only see three routes
1) we get a massive uptick in retail participants. Ords will be totally novel to anyone who wasn’t an onchain degen last cycle. I don’t love this path because it requires a lot of macro to align and we have zero control over any of it
2) we find a new use case specifically well suited for bitcoin
This is a bit of a tough one. Bitcoin excels at permanence and security, which is great for art. What else? I’m not sure.
Maybe defi? USDT? How much do defi participants care about permanence and security stronger than ethereum? Can bitcoin even offer stronger security for defi, considering onchain smart contracts require some workarounds? Would defi even attract the sort of participants that would buy our art and collectibles? Would it be silo’d off into a meta protocol making it hard for liquidity to flow to ordinals anyways?
I find all of that to be very uncertain
3) we find a way to very substantially improve on what bitcoin is already good at, art and collectibles
This sounds most plausible to me. The question is, what can actually be done? Marketplaces have already solved some of the worst problems like sniping.
Heres a few things I can think of
-find a way to reward active, long term focused founders. This is a big one and nobody is doing it well in nft land imo. It’s a massive fucking problem that our top Ord collections rn have no way to continue incentivizing founders without them just diluting their supply with new mints.
-find novel and fun ways to show off our collections. Making collecting fun and social would be huge. Rn all my Ords just sit in a wallet nobody looks at. Same issue on ethereum.
-remove buying friction. It’s still kind of a pain in the ass to load a BTC wallet and buy Ords. I know udi experimented with using sol for ordinals mints, and I think that’s good outside the box thinking. What matters is that the Ords live on bitcoin, not the payment method for acquiring them
-find a way to reward long term holders and participants. I see this as adjacent to my point about founders. Platform incentives or some other sort of incentives, done properly and at scale, would be game changing
-find a way to make airdrops cheap. Sparks actually did a good job at this (probably their only W). It’s a huge problem that it takes massive amounts of capital to do an airdrop in our ecosystem. Solve this and we have another tool to create value and momentum
That’s all my thoughts for now