Source: Decrypt; Author: Andre Beganski; Translator: BitpushNews Scott Liu
BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes announced the launch of a new project in the Bitcoin Ordinals series, Airhead (fool head, as shown below), officially entering the Bitcoin digital collectibles market. The batch of resizable profile pictures (PFPs) includes 10,000 NFT-like assets and is the product of a partnership with Oyl Wallet. The company launched earlier this month and began soliciting a list of potential buyers for Airhead on Thursday. The startup’s investors include Hayes’ family office, Maelstrom.
Hayes told Decrypt: "This is not simply issuing NFTs on Bitcoin, but something completely different, focusing on things that Bitcoin users really care about."
The Bitcoin Ordinals protocol was launched by developer Casey Rodarmor at the beginning of last year, and it quickly injected vitality into the collectibles market based on Bitcoin. In April of this year, Rodarmor launched the Runes protocol, and at the same time, Bitcoin's halving also promoted changes in the entire market. Now, Airhead uses the so-called recursive inscription technology to give these digital characters functions that are currently not possible on other networks.
Through the Airhead project, Hayes hopes to bring innovation to the field of digital art. Based on the function of Ordinals, the body of the Airhead character will grow accordingly according to the value of the Bitcoin wallet, bringing a new experience to users.
Hayes emphasized: "I don't want to go through another AI-generated headshot. We have done it many times and it's too boring."
The technology that supports Airheads' vision is the same function used by a project called Pizza Ninjas to create a game simulator on Bitcoin. Last year, recursive inscriptions were also used to create a music engine on Bitcoin. Essentially, recursive inscriptions make Bitcoin applications more complex by taking data from multiple entries.
The Airhead project's promotional content on social media is somewhere between satire and hilarious. Cole Jorissen, the project's creative director and product lead at Oyl, said the series pokes fun at the "body love movement." "We're making wealth a character trait - fat means rich," he said.
Hayes said Ordinals attracts a different audience than NFTs on Ethereum and Solana because Bitcoin has the largest market cap and share of all digital assets. He said Bitcoin's price is closer to its all-time high than other currencies, so more people will buy digital art.
Hayes said: "When you lose money, you don't invest in digital art. I think Ordinals are special and will be collected when Bitcoin breaks out of this range we are in now."
According to CryptoSlam data, about $128 million worth of NFTs have been traded on Ethereum in the past month. In comparison, Solana's sales were $89 million and Bitcoin's sales were $70 million, which means that the Ethereum network, which popularized NFTs, is still the industry leader.
Meanwhile, Hayes is taking a long-term view of Ordinals. When the last Bitcoin is mined around 2140, the fees people earn from trading Ordinals will help boost miners’ rewards while incentivizing them to secure the network, Hayes said.
Xu Lin
