It is a protocol that developed once the Bitcoin blockchain had the “Taproot” update last year. After the update, Casey Rodarmor found a way to make Satoshis (100 million sats per BTC) “non fungible” by “inscribing” text on them.

I won’t get more technical than that - today we’re high level overview for business and marketing people - but basically

YOU NEED TO BE SUPER CAREFUL - as Ordinals / inscriptions are “the same” as normal BTC sats - but you need to have special wallets.

If you send an ordinal to a “normal” BTC wallet, it will just get lumped in as “cash” / normal satoshi - so you need to have a newer Taproot enabled BTC wallet that keeps the Ordinal sats separate from the “normal btc”.

It is easier to understand in a video and in a use case, so let’s move forward.

I’m seeing quite a few different ones, but speaking as a “businessman” and “marketer” the one I have found most intuitive is the XVerse app. There is OrdinalsWallet and Sparrow Wallet and others - but for this demo and what I am using is XVerse.

You can download that wallet for Chrome or mobile apps at
https://www.xverse.app/

In our demo I’ll be using it on my laptop with a Chrome extension.

So if you are following along, you can go to your Chrome extension and click “receive” -

As shown below

BTC to receive funds, from an exchange or an older BTC wallet

Ordinals to receive the “NFTs” (I like to call them Bitcoin artifacts, as Casey does).

I won’t dive into this one, mainly because we haven’t made our own yet - but from my research you have 2 options

Option 1 - run a full BTC node and do it yourself.
Option 2 - pay various online service providers to inscribe for you (for a fee) and they send to your Ordinals address.

Of course option 1 is better if you are going to do this at scale and want to support the network and not be dependent on others. But a BTC node is about 500 gb and will take a day + to sync.

Option 2 is good for a few uses, and also to save time. Of course trust this service provider as they could just take your service fee and not deliver the inscription, etc.

Ok, so where can you go to find things?

From my own research, and hopping in Twitter spaces, discords, asking around, as of early April these are the ones I see

MagicEden.io is embracing Ordinals fast with a lot of collections and lots of listings.
Ordinalswallet.com is also a wallet, but also a marketplace. OrdSwap is another, I have yet to get the wallet to connect.

But now, even better there are aggregators that pull the listings from all these marketplaces and make it easy for you to sort, filter, browse, and then click to go to the marketplace where the BTC Ordinal Inscription you want to buy is.

We’ll buy a Bitcoin Frog since it is a low entry point and an easy one to show.

BestinSlot.xyz is the place I am going to find those.

Again, this is not financial advice, do you own research, blah blah.

But here are some insights I have learned

All ordinals have a number in sequence order , so the lower the number, the “older” and more “scarce” or more “special it is. Ordinals starting to be inscribed in Feb 2023 (from what I can see) and you can see new collections coming:

Sub 10k collection
Sub 100k collection

Meaning these take ALL ordinal inscriptions that are made before the first 10,000 and first 100,000 respectively. Irregardless if they are in a collection, a text, an image, etc. It just says “These are “OG””

The thought process I am applying here is “nostalgia” - you can see when this inscription happened (the date, time, SAT#) and it is a story and a screenshot in time. Imagine this being on your wall at your office and you explain to a guest how this is one of the first 100,000 Ordinal Inscriptions ever made. The pure experience of inscribing, of experimenting, of Bitcoin becoming more than just a “rock”.

Collections matter just like anywhere, and the community and roadmap. But I am focusing more on earlier inscription collections (sub 100k) because I believe they will be the OG collections and what holders want.

Actually once you have a wallet such as Xverse installed on your Chrome, it is very similar to Metamask, Keplr, and other browser based wallets. Simply click buy and then you need to “warm up” your wallet

Watch our demo, the first time you’ll pay a small transaction fee (about 1 USD in our experience) to get your new wallet to connect to the marketplace(s).

The wait time is longer than Ethererum - you can watch it transact on the block explorer, generally I notice it takes about 10 minutes to complete.

Again, treat this as an experiment. Don’t invest more than you can see go to zero and be part and experiment and learn.

I see this as a timeline of information, you can already see the Ordinal numbers “improve” as it moves from 100,000 to 500,000 to 1million inscriptions. Like humans in the caveman days writing on the walls of caves, the art will improve. But those first stick figures are what will be most memorable and special, as they were the pioneers.