Thirteen years after the birth of the world's first bitcoin, The pioneering cryptocurrency network faces a new wave of disruption thanks to Ordinals, a recently launched protocol that allows the addition of digital content, such as art to the Bitcoin blockchain i.e., non-fungible tokens.
Since the launch of Ordinal NFTs on the Bitcoin mainnet in January 2023, traffic to the network has increased significantly, transaction costs have soared, and issues surrounding Bitcoin have arisen.
The Bitcoin mempool, the "waiting area" for incoming transactions on the network, has over 286,000 pending transactions at the time of writing. While this figure is down from a peak of 400,000 blocked transactions at the beginning of the month, it is still at an all-time high. In an interview with Cointelegraph’s Joe Hall during last week’s Bitcoin Builders, Trust Machines CEO Muneeb Ali explained how the hype around Ordinals NFTs supports Bitcoin in attracting more developers and capital to layer 2 solutions. “Bitcoin is the biggest asset. We should have the best developers, the best scientists working on layer 2 of Bitcoin,” Ali said. He believes that the spike in fees provides clear evidence to developers and investors that Bitcoin’s layer 2 protocol is in demand.
The purpose of Layer-2 solutions is to improve the scalability, privacy, and other properties of Layer-1 blockchains such as the Bitcoin network. Ali's Trust Machines is a layer-agnostic ecosystem for Bitcoin applications, built on top of the various layers of the Bitcoin network.
