OKX has announced that it is adding support for Atomicals (ARC-20), Stamps (SRC-20), Runes and Dogecoin’s Doginals (DRC-20) to its platform, with plans to launch a marketplace in the near future.
OKX says it will integrate the bitcoin token standard SRC-20 for viewing and transferring inscription standards on February 5, followed by the integration of ARC-20, DRC-20 and Runes standards in late February.
OKX Wallet’s inscription tool currently supports inscriptions on 23 networks, including Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Ethereum, Polygon, BNB Chain, Avalanche-C, Arbitrum One, and a number of others.
Inscriptions took off this past year after its initial launch on the bitcoin blockchain. According to data from Dune, there are more than 58 million entries on the bitcoin blockchain and $166.8 million is spent on BRC-20 fees.
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While inscriptions are often equated with non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and share many similar characteristics, they are not quite the same. Inscriptions are incorporated directly into the chain, while NFTs are simply a link between the blockchain and a jpeg or other file stored on a server.
“It’s not a Web2 link, it’s a pure Web3 product,” OKX Chief Innovation Officer Jason Lau said in an interview with CoinDesk.
Anyone who bought an NFT through FTX’s marketplace learned this lesson in December 2022, when the “Web2 link” between jpeg and chain broke as bankruptcy officials took over FTX’s servers, leaving NFTs blank and linking to pages reporting the bankruptcy announced.
“These things will last forever as long as the chain lasts,” Lau said.
Lau sees inscriptions as a “new canvas” for Web3 creators.
“It’s been a little over a year since the first public ordinal and inscription were minted. And during that year, the community has really grown… I think of it as a new canvas,” he said. “I like using the word canvas because users, makers and various developers can choose what features and functions they want and choose the change that makes sense.
Lau gives the example of high-end, rare or premium NFT collections on bitcoin due to the premium block space and the demand for high-quality ordinal numbers and inscriptions. While more accessible or mass market projects may be appropriate, chains like Solana may be appropriate, emphasizing the importance of storing art and data immutably across the chain.
While Lau acknowledged that There is an ongoing debate about inscriptions on the Bitcoin blockchain. He dismisses those who call it a waste or blockchain pollution as a marginal position.
“I think it’s really a bitcoin maxi-driven kind of story,” he said. “Our perspective is that more use of bitcoin and more use of bitcoin blockspace is good for the network.”