Bitcoin Rises Over 15% With Ordinal NFT Boost, STX, MATIC, CFX, February 20

BTC rally continues with 15% weekly gain. STX increases on Ordinal activity. MATIC jumps into the top ten. CFX gives a 500% gain for the week.

BTC

Bitcoin continued its recent rally with a 15% gain for the week.

The latest rally in the world’s largest cryptocurrency is being driven by Ordinals Inscriptions which has opened up the potential for non-fungible tokens on the oldest blockchain.

The market is buzzing about the potential for BTC NFTs to enhance Ethereum’s offerings. Unlike Ethereum NFTs, which rely on off-chain metadata that can be changed, Ordinal Inscriptions allow all data to be written directly on-chain.

Bitcoin’s Ordinal NFTs are the brainchild of software engineer Casey Rodarmor, who wanted to improve this flaw in NFTs with the Bitcoin Ordinals protocol. However, there is mixed opinion on what this could do for Bitcoin. Those in favor believe that Ordinal Inscriptions can create a new direction for the bitcoin community and improve the technology that supports NFTs.

Others see it as a distraction, and as more Ordinals are entered, the cost of bitcoin transactions has increased. This is due to the fact that Ordinals include additional, non-financial data on the Bitcoin blockchain that slows down on-chain confirmation times. This data includes images, sound clips and games.

The Ordinals protocol has seen a resurgence of interest in bitcoin development and has led to an increase in average block size as more users join the network, research firm FSInsight said.

Bitcoin traded at $21,650 on Monday after the SEC’s actions at $21,500 provided initial support ahead of the key $20,000 support level.

STX

Stacks (STX) was a big gainer this week with a 100% move higher as the Bitcoin Layer 2 project benefited from the Ordinals hype.

Stacks Network is a Bitcoin layer 2 smart contract network and aims to make the bitcoin blockchain programmable with NFT and smart contract capabilities.

Stacks uses a separate ledger to store data outside of the Bitcoin blockchain, allowing developers to build applications similar to Ethereum and Solana.

STX was also the first token offering approved by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and the token is used to incentivize Stacks miners and participants in the proposed Stacks bitcoin (sBTC) system.

Ordinals went public on January 21st, and the number of newly created Ordinals NFTs subscribed crossed the 100,000 mark last week, causing network congestion on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Per Muneeb Ali, co-founder of Stacks, said the popularity of Ordinals would be good for layer 2 solutions.

“Ordinals on Bitcoin L1 are complementary to Bitcoin NFTs on L2s like Stacks. Ordinals have a natural limit on the L1 scale, and L2s provide a clear scalability path. Wallets like Xverse and &Hiro are among the first to release or operate on Ordinals.

The price of STX rose to $0.50 this week and may continue to benefit from Ordinals in the weeks ahead.

MATIC

MATIC was the top ten coin with a move of over 25% for the week, and Polygon’s price action has seen the project break into the top ten coins of 2023.

Data from WhaleStats has also shown that Polygon is the fifth largest crypto asset among the 5,000 largest Ethereum whales.

Polygon is gaining ground due to development activity in the project. Polygon Labs, the Polygon development team, announced that the zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) beta would launch on March 27.

Zk-based technology is seen as the gold standard for scaling, and existing rollups like Arbitrum and Optimism have EVM capability, but are less secure because they are “fraud-proof” as malicious transactions can remain live for up to seven days. Another boost for MATIC is that Ethereum’s upcoming transition to Liquid Staking Derivatives may shift towards layer-2 networks after the Shanghai upgrade in March.

The price of MATIC has drifted higher to the $1.46 price level, which is a 100% gain for 2023.

CFX

Conflux (CFX) has been a big mover this year, with the project up over 500% last week.

Conflux Network, also known as Shanghai Tree-Graph Blockchain Research Institute, is the only regulatory, public and permissionless blockchain in China. Conflux is a layer-1 blockchain that operates on a hybrid proof-of-work and proof-of-stake mechanism.

Conflux Network announced a partnership with Little Red Book, a Chinese social media platform, to provide non-fungible token services. The partnership will open up the Conflux Network for Little Red Books’ 200 million users. Furthermore, on February 15, Conflux Network partnered with China Telecom to develop a blockchain SIM (BSIM) card service in Hong Kong. It will provide access to China Telecom’s 350 million users.

CFX has risen to a price of $0.298 in the last week and has a market capitalization of $1.5 billion. The project has quickly moved into the top 100 projects with a ranking of 77 at the time of writing.