Bitcoin Ordinals to Bridge Ethereum NFTs with the Launch of BRC-721E

by · May 30, 2023

Bitcoin Ordinals is the latest layer-2 solution that enables decentralized storage of digital art on the Bitcoin blockchain. Ordinals will now allow users to migrate their Ethereum ERC-721-based non-fungible tokens (NFT) to the Bitcoin blockchain with the launch of the BRC-721E standard.

The BRC-721E standard was jointly launched by Ordinals market – an Ordinals-based marketplace – and Bitcoin Milady’s NFT collection. The new BRC-721E standard enables the conversion of immutable, verifiable ERC-721 NFTs to Ordinals. Initially, no metadata is stored on-chain, but users can save a lower-quality preview image and include a reference to the Ether burn (ETH) in the raw image data.

The migration process starts by burning ERC-721 NFT with an ETH call function. The burning of NFT is an irreversible process and acts as an inscription method on the chain. To claim the ETH burn on Bitcoin, the user must enter valid BRC-721E data, after which the bridged NFT will appear on a custom Ordinals market collection page with full metadata.

The indexers checking the burned NFT data inscriptions ensure that a token does not have more than one valid inscription and that the origin address matches the burn transaction call data.

Related: Bitcoin Ordinals Surpass 10 Million Inscriptions As Creator Rodarmor Resigns

The Ordinals market asserted the basic principles of BRC-721E and the flexibility of the indexers allows the protocol to evolve over time, despite metadata not initially being stored on-chain.

Bitcoin Ordinals have drawn widespread reaction from the crypto community since its launch in January 2023. The launch of the BRC-20 token standard in March created an experimental fungible token standard designed specifically for the Bitcoin blockchain. The combination of BRC-20 with Ordinals opened new gates for the minting of tokens on the Bitcoin blockchain, with the crypto community seeing the emergence of many popular BRC-20 tokens, such as Ordinals (ORDI), Vmpx (VMPX) and Pepecoin (PEPE).

The number of BRC-20 tokens has skyrocketed from a few hundred in the first week to over 25,000 at the time of publication. However, the rise of Ordinals and the new token coinage has not been unanimously well received, with many Bitcoin (BTC) supporters criticizing the new method as inefficient and wasteful.

Blade: $3.4 Billion in Bitcoin in a Popcorn Box — The Silk Road Hacker’s Story