OKX Exec Debunks Spam in Bitcoin Ordinals

While opinions on the Ordinals protocol in the Bitcoin ecosystem may differ, some individuals are doubling down on their support for nonfungible tokens (NFTs) in Bitcoin. Recently, OKX’s NFT marketplace surpassed its competitors in daily trading volume, indicating a growing interest in Bitcoin-based NFTs. In an effort to further support Bitcoin NFTs, OKX announced on January 29th that it would add Atomicals and Runes to its marketplace. The company plans to venture into supporting Ordinals on other chains by adding Dogecoin’s Doginals.

Aside from its marketplace, OKX also declared its intention to support token standards from Atomicals, Stamps, Runes, and Doginals on its Web3 Wallet. Though OKX is openly supportive of Ordinals and other Bitcoin protocols, there are members of the Bitcoin ecosystem who have expressed their dislike for Bitcoin Ordinals, even labeling them as digital spam. Jason Lau, the chief innovation officer at OKX, disagrees with this sentiment. He believes that in open and permissionless networks like Bitcoin, there is no concept of spam. According to Lau, as long as the fees are paid and the transactions conform to consensus rules, they are considered valid. He emphasized OKX’s history of supporting upgrades and argued that Ordinals offer new use cases for users and a new design space for developers.

On December 19th, several blockchains, including Arbitrum, Avalanche, Cronos, zkSync, and The Open Network, experienced outages either in full or in part. This disruption was a result of a surge in transaction activity caused by people creating inscriptions on other networks, similar to Bitcoin Ordinals. Lau acknowledged these disruptions as “growing pains” that are to be expected in the early stages of adoption. While Lau views these issues as normal, he believes they will be resolved with time. OKX sees inscriptions as an opportunity for growth and plans to expand its support beyond just BRC-20 to include emerging standards like Atomicals, Stamps, Runes, and Doginals.