May 08
Notable Ordinals - The most popular Ordinal projects
To put it simply, Ordinals are like NFTs but on Bitcoin. More than a year old, they took the Bitcoin ecosystem by storm. In this article, we talk about several popular Ordinal collections.
If you're complete new to Ordinals, we recommend you to get started with this piece, written by one of our Captains in Feburary 2023.
It will give you a good introduction into the world of Ordinals. Now, let's have a look at some of the most popular Ordinal projects at this moment!
NodeMonkes
Launched in December 2023, NodeMonkes have been one of the most highly-anticipated Ordinals collections. It was the first original 10K PFP inscribed on Bitcoin. While Bitcoin Punks and OnChainMonkeys got inscriptions before NodeMonkes, those were derived from the PFP projects existing on Ethereum.
With its 0.03 BTC mint fee – which at the time of mint was about $1,250 – NodeMonkes surged to 0.89 BTC in early March. This is a staggering 2,870% return for minters and first holders!
Though the hype around the collection has slightly cooled down and the floor price fell below 0.4 BTC at the time of writing, NodeMonkes are still among the most traded assets in the Ordinals space. Their market cap falls behind only that of CryptoPunks, BAYC, and Pudgy Penguins.
Hashlings
Hashlings are one of the few Ordinals projects offering real utility to its holders. Buying a Hashling allows you to get a mining rig s19k at discount. On top of lower cost for purchasing a rig, buying through Hashlings has other advantages as well:
- As a retail buyer, you have to pay shipping fees. If you choose to get the rig via Hashlings, these fees are covered by them.
- If you get a damaged rig, you will have to pay for returning the rig to the seller. You are lucky if the seller agrees to replace the old rig with the new one. However, Hashlings will replace your faulty rig with one of their rigs in case you experience any problem with your device.
- You will keep all your mined bitcoin. There is no revenue sharing. It is all your satoshis.
With the Bitcoin halving right behind us in April 2024, I believe the demand for Hashlings will go up which will drive their floor price.
RSIC Metaprotocol
Runes are fungible tokens issued directly on Bitcoin. If Ordinals protocol makes it possible to create NFTs on Bitcoin, Runes protocol streamlines the issuance of fungible tokens on the first blockchain. What if I told you there is an Ordinals collection minting runes? It is called RSIC Metaprotocol. Airdropped in January to more than 9,000 wallets holding various Ordinals, RSIC stand for Rune Specific Inscription Circuits. There are 21,000 RSICs which, if boosted, mine 42 runes per Bitcoin block. On top of that, if the hash value of your RSIC’s symbol – which you can find at lower right of the inscription – matches with the blockhash of a particular block, your RSIC will mine 336 runes at that block.
At the time of writing, RSIC rune is trading at $0.017 on Whales Market.
Rare Sats
Ordinals Protocol enabled identification of individual satoshis and inscribing data onto them.
But not all satoshis are created – I should say minted – equal. As there are coins which are worth much more than their nominal value, some satoshis or sats can be traded at a higher price in comparison to 1 sat which is just one-hundred-millionth of a bitcoin. These are rare sats. What are they? Why they can be valuable than their monetary value?
There will never be more than 2.1 quadrillion sats. It’s a number Satoshi Nakamoto came up with and it cannot be modified (unless some future technology, such as AGI or quantum computers “breaks” Bitcoin). As people started to trade bitcoin, some sats became more sought-after than others. For example, some sats come from early blocks mined by Satoshi himself. Or take the Block 9, the ninth block after the genesis block on the Bitcoin blockchain. It contains transactions between Satoshi Nakamoto and Hal Finney, one of the earliest users of Bitcoin. Since this is the first transfer of bitcoins, thus sats, between two users, Block 9 has a unique significance in the history of Bitcoin, and sats from this block are considered rare.
Rodarmor Rarity Index determines the rarity of individual sats and divides them into 5 categories:
- Common. Any sat that doesn’t fall into any category below. These are almost 99% of the entire supply of sats. Put differently, it is any sat that is not the first sat in a block in which it was mined.
- Uncommon. Every 10 minutes a new block is mined and added to the Bitcoin blockchain. The first sat of each block.
- Rare. To maintain the relatively stable rate of producing one block every 10 minutes the Bitcoin network periodically adjusts its difficulty. This happens every 2016 blocks or about two weeks. Rare sat is the first sat of each difficulty adjustment period.
- Epic. Bitcoin halving occurs every 210,000 blocks which takes approximately 4 years. These events hold a significance for the network because they are followed by the decrease in mining rewards. The first sat of the first block mined in each halving epoch is an epic sat, according to Casey Rodarmor, the person behind Ordinals protocol.
- Legendary. There will be some periods in Bitcoin’s history when difficulty adjustment period and the halving event are expected to coincide. This will happen every 24 years the first of which will supposedly occur in 2032. This marks a new cycle. The first sat mined in each cycle is known as a legendary sat.
- Mythic. This is the first ever sat mined on the Bitcoin’s genesis, i.e., first block which was mined in 2009.
Besides rare ones, there are sats which can be regarded valuable due to other reasons. These sats are referred to as “exotic”. Some sats are palindrome – their number is read the same forwards and backwards, e.g., 2570752. Some sats are associated with events holding unique significance in Bitcoin history. For example, pizza sats are from one of the first commercial Bitcoin transactions when a user paid 10K BTC to purchase 2 pizzas. People tend to appreciate old items; so it isn’t surprising there are vintage sats which come from the first mined 1,000 Bitcoin blocks.
Ordinal Maxi Biz
In June 2023 an event seen as sacrilege by many NFT holders happened. Some users combined their funds, then they bought CryptoPunk #8611 and sent it to an Ethereum burn address, effectively burning an asset of one of the most popular NFT collections in the world. Those participating in this burning were given a whitelist spot for a new Ordinals project – Ordinal Maxi Biz (OMB). This guerilla marketing campaign is the reason why OMB got popular.
OMB consists of three collections - Blue eyes, Red eyes, and Green eyes. All PFPs of Green eyes were inscribed on the sats from the famous Block 9 mentioned in the section above. All-time high floor price for OMB was 4.2 BTC last summer. At the time of writing one can buy an OMB for 0.42 BTC, which is still out of the price range for many people.
Disclaimer: Nothing on this site should be construed as a financial investment recommendation. It’s important to understand that investing is a high-risk activity. Investments expose money to potential loss.
