Good news and bad news for NFTs and ordinal numbers

TL;DR

• Simply put, BRC-721E allows NFTs originally minted on Ethereum to move over to the Bitcoin network.

• To move NFTs from Ethereum to Bitcoin, they must be sent to a ‘burn’ address (which permanently destroys them), and the same data is then recreated on the Bitcoin network.

• Innovation continues in the Web3 space, even if this functionality is a bit half-baked.

Full story

We have good news and we have bad news.

The Good news (and the key insight for this article) is that this is yet another classic example of ongoing innovation in the Web3 space.

The bad news: well, the innovation is rather half-baked.

All the talk this year has been about the Ordinals protocol.

It’s like NFTs on the Bitcoin network, allowing people to store images, text (and more) on Bitcoin instead of on a purpose-built network like Ethereum or Solana.

And on Monday, the number of existing Ordinals reached 10 million!

Today’s innovation comes in the form of a random collection of letters and numbers: the token standard ‘BRC-721E’.

Simply put, BRC-721E allows NFTs originally minted on Ethereum to move over to the Bitcoin network.

Ready for the rather half-baked part? Once moved, it is permanent.

To move NFTs from Ethereum to Bitcoin, they must be sent to a ‘burn’ address (which permanently destroys them), and the same data is then recreated on the Bitcoin network.

So, as we said, innovation continues in Web3 – heck, Ordinals didn’t even exist until January of this year!

While this is a one-way street for now, I’m sure it won’t be far into the future before Ordinals can be sent to the Ethereum network.