The NFT market isn’t just dead. It’s in freaking cardiac arrest. Remember 2021? The year you could crow and the other public grandma was flipping JPEGs for Lambo money. As it turns out, Lambo wasn’t even a rental. As for that JPEG, well, let me tell you, it wasn’t no Mona Lisa! We once were promised digital ownership, but we received digital receipts that only lead to servers that are leaning on the edge of a cliff.
NFT Discovery Is Utterly Broken
Let's be real, finding a decent NFT project felt like winning the lottery, after wrestling a bear, while solving a Rubik's Cube. Whitelists were an unmitigated joke. If the application process didn’t dissuade you, you had to shill harder than a used car salesman just to get a chance at being invited. Rug pulls kept happening as frequently as cat videos surfaced. And don’t even get me started on those pump-and-dump schemes. It feels as if the whole ecosystem was purpose-built for a select few insiders to line their pockets while the rest of us all got rekt. Feeling anxious yet? You should!
The problem? Centralized control. These so-called decentralized platforms are anything but. They control what gets visibility, who gets availability, and at the end of the day, who profits. It’s the crypto art world that exists, technically, on a blockchain medal, dominated by tech bros with diamond hands and shark ethics.
Recall that viral meme of the sad dog sitting in a fire and saying, “This is OK”? That's the NFT market right now.
Bitcoin Ordinals A Wild Savior?
Now, here's where things get interesting. Enter Bitcoin Ordinals, also known as inscriptions. Yes, that Bitcoin. But that’s the granddaddy of crypto – bitcoin itself – which many call slow and boring. But guess what? It could be exactly the defibrillator the NFT ecosystem needs.
Think of it this way: while your fancy NFT is basically a pointer to a JPEG hosted on some random server, a Bitcoin inscription is the art, baked directly into the Bitcoin blockchain. It's permanent. It's immutable. It's unstoppable. In fact, tens of thousands of Bitcoin nodes are independently storing these inscriptions, a powerful new decentralized storage mechanism. No longer will you need to fret about that one centralized server going down and your valuable digital art disappearing into the metaverse.
This is not merely a technical upgrade—it is a philosophical one. It's about true digital ownership. Take back control from big, top-down feeds! Return it to the control of individual creators and collectors.
Among these efforts is Signals, a new platform from Gamma, which is taking the issue of broken discovery to task. Their model of auction clearing price is intended to level an uneven playing field for all! Just think—price discovery driven by real-world adoption, not influencer speculation and market maker bots!
Embrace The NFT Apocalypse!
Look, I’m not here to claim Bitcoin Ordinals are the magic bullet. They're still new, still evolving. Despite these scalability challenges and ongoing disputes over whether or not inscriptions are “real” Bitcoin, they represent a radical departure in the way we think about and engage with digital art. This perspective is rooted in the ideals of decentralization, permanence, and real ownership that the space was built upon.
Forget the hype. Forget the Lambos. Forget the ridiculous whitelist requirements. Rather than cringing at or lamenting the NFT apocalypse, it’s time to accept it and use it to create something great. Something real. Something more meaningful than a JPEG, and something that truly fulfills the promise of what digital ownership could be.
The SEC has only recently approved in-kind BTC ETFs. Just as Bitcoin treasury companies will soon start to look like the overleveraged investment trusts of 1929, now is the perfect time to get back to basics.
So, I challenge you: explore Bitcoin inscriptions. Create your own. Join the community. Help shape the future of digital art. Because if we don’t, we’re just asking to make the same mistakes as before. And no one wants to see another JPEG3 go up in flames.
