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Welcome to the 14 people who joined this weekend. Take a look at the person to your left. Now the person to your right.

Statistically one of you will become a power reader that opens all our mail. And we’ll love you just a little bit more than the rest. 🤝 

In today’s edition:

• Bad news for Bitcoin NFTs

• Our updated NFT rankings

• New drops we found over the weekend

More info on Mint/Watch lists HERE.

Bad news for Bitcoin NFTs

Crypto is a competitive place. My chain can do this, your chain can’t, my protocol uses proof-of-whatever, yours doesn’t, Vitalik can deadlift three times Satoshi’s weight, etc.

This week’s debate seems to be “who can take the biggest dump on NFTs?”

On Friday we spoke about how Ethereum memecoins like $PEPE were bullying NFTs out of the room by snatching all the attention and blockspace. Essentially, fees were making it impossible to mint or trade our favorite JPEGs.

And now Bitcoin, which refuses to be outdone by little bro, is saying hold my Modelo.

Specifically, Bitcoin NFTs took two beatdowns this week:

Beatdown #1: BRC-20 is blowing JPEGs out of the water.

Quick refresher: the vast majority of today’s Bitcoin NFTs run on the Ordinals protocol. But they’re not the only ones using it.

Recently Ordinals also became home to the new BRC-20 tokens, which are essentially semi-fungible collections, something in between currencies like $PEPE and NFTs.

And BRC-20s are absolutely crushing it. On Saturday, a total of 399,000 BRC-20s were inscribed – a new daily record. In fact, there are now 4.6 million Ordinals since people started making them in January, and over 50% of that has come in the last 10 days due to BRC-20.

Bitcoin NFTs are doing the opposite. Back in early April, people were inscribing 15-20k image Ordinals (aka NFTs) per day. On Saturday there were only 20 of these NFTs. Today there are 47.

Why? One major difference between NFTs on Ethereum and on Bitcoin is who pays to “mint” them.

On Ethereum, a creator sets up a contract, but the collectors pay to actually bring each individual NFT into existence. On Bitcoin, the creator is the one paying the fees to “inscribe” each NFT on the blockchain.

Even if the creator wants to give them away for free, they still have to pay the toll.

This means Bitcoin will always have a more curated NFT supply than Ethereum since it’s simply a more expensive chain to launch on.

But it also means that when fees get expensive you’ll see on-chain art drop off a cliff (BRC-20 costs less). And if you’ve ever been at a party when the vino runs out, getting momentum back can be tough.

This is what’s happening. BRC-20 activity is sending fees through the roof, which as we stated is bad news for art projects.

Danny Deezy pointed out that a single piece of on-chain art would cost $750 to inscribe given the current fee situation. And the largest ordinals collection (Bitcoin Apes) would’ve cost $24 million to create today.

That’s not to say that BRC-20s should go away, or that this is anything but a free market at work, but it does make life a lot harder for art enjoooyors.

Beatdown #2: Someone found a bug in Ordinals.

I am become Math, breaker of jpegs. This was the message sent by supertestnet after finding a bug on May 3rd that could change how Bitcoin NFTs work.

What happened? Simply put, he was able to send a transaction with 0 input and 0 output. In other words, there wasn’t a Satoshi to inscribe data on, but it was still counted as an Ordinal (more info here). This isn’t supposed to happen.

He then published the code for anyone else to do the same kind of transaction.

Now to be clear, this doesn’t affect the provenance of Ordinals. It doesn’t really break anything important.

But it does affect the NUMBERING of Ordinals. For those that aren’t aware, Ordinals are different from Ethereum NFTs in that they have a numbering system (e.g. the first Ordinal was inscription #1, followed by #2 etc). And now you have this awkward situation where you’re counting all these phantom transactions, which messes up the true order.

This sucks for investors that paid big bucks for low-number Ordinals. If the numbering system gets deprioritized, or scrapped altogether, it might make it harder for them to get into the VIP area of Coachella in 10 years just by flashing their Bitcoin Rock inscription #163.

Of course, this is the risk of investing in new frontier technologies.

People forget that Ordinals have only been around for roughly 6 months. They’re not lindy yet, and still might have cracks and weird edge cases that need to be ironed out.

Let’s end on a high note: it’s good that we get through all these weird glitches now, instead of later when there might be a lot more value riding on Ordinal Theory.

At least that’s what I keep telling myself.

NOTE: These drops are lightly curated. Our only requirement is that they have recognizable founders. As usual, DYOR. To learn more go here.

CRIM3 by Three Panel Crimes

Narrative crypto artists Three Panel Crimes launch their Nifty Gateway Curated debut, CRIM3, this Friday at 6:30 PM EDT, showcasing the crypto crime scene in pixel art.

The collection has three parts:

1. Hackers – 10-edition ranked auction

2. Slots – 24-hour Open Edition at $69

3. Bar – 5-supply edition at $4.20 only for primary sale collectors via raffle

Tur by Ganchitecture

Tezos-native art platform Tender recently announced an upcoming AI art collaboration on Ethereum with pseudonymous artist Ganchitecture.

Tur is a 444-supply collection priced at 0.08 ETH and will start minting Friday at 12:00 PM EDT on the Tender website using the Art Blocks Engine for mint generation. The art showcases reimagined architecture in grayscale tones.

As with other Tender collaborations, the first phase of the mint will be fully allocated for Tender Pass holders with a public phase an hour later.

EET

Acclaimed Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang and pseudonymous crypto art collective Kanon are launching an NFT oracle experience EET.

Users ask the EET oracle a question, mint a fortune tied to it, and receive an AI-generated answer. Fortunes include on-chain GIFs with a title and six verses.

A blend of blockchain, AI, and Eastern tradition, it remains to be seen if this is differentiated and fun enough to justify the price over free AI alternatives.

THE MINT LIST

1. Nike Our Force 1. Digital shoe drop from the global consumer brand.

2. Project Animus. RTFKT's biggest launch since Clone-X.

3. FewoWorld. New PFP by Fewocious, a rising star in the art world.

4. Symbiogenesis. Square Enix's upcoming gaming NFT.

5. 10KFT PFP. Drop from a team that includes Yuga and Beeple.

6. Ether. Anime PFP collection by viii, an artist with a cult following.

7. BIG INC. New free mint from the goblintown team.

8. ZOGZ by Matt Furie. Open Editions from the creator of Pepe.

9. Memories of Digital Data by Tanimoto. Appealing AB Curated.

10. Garbage Friends. New PFP from the creator of Invisible Friends.