Transcript 0:00 [funky music] Welcome back to "The Bitcoin Season 2" weekly live stream. 0:38 Bitcoin Season 2 is produced by Blockspace Media. I'm Blockspace Media co-founder Charlie Spears. Bitcoin Season 2 is about new conversations and new topics on Bitcoin. 0:49 I talk about the cultural and the technical, a lot of ordinals and runes, and Bitcoin, uh, layer twos, if you will. This is a live stream. This is, uh, Monday afternoons, uh, this time roughly every Monday. 1:02 Uh, I will do a little more news, more current events, and some metrics. Uh, so stay locked. Make sure if you're watching this, uh, to check out the, uh, charts that I've got. 1:13 If y- and if you're listening to this, uh, this is mostly a visual presentation, so I'll be relying heavily on, uh, charts. I'll try to describe them as, as best I can. 1:23 Make sure to check out other Blockspace Media content, like the Gort Show or the Mining Pod, and our newsletter coming out every Tuesday and Friday. 1:32 That'll share some interesting insights, including the one I'm currently working on for tomorrow, Tuesday, on the landscape of Bitcoin leverage and loans to ordinals users. 1:43 So, um, in this episode, I'll probably talk about how ordinals are dead, as per usual. It's a more ordinals-heavy episode this time, kind of at the bottom of the market. 1:52 Um, talk about some of the interesting products that people are building in the ordinals ecosystem, and then wrap it up with a treatment and discussion on the landscape of, uh, loans and defaulted loans in Bitcoin. 2:05 So let's get into it. Uh, first of all, Bitcoin fee rates are down bad. We are now at five cents for vByte. This is, uh, pretty much low. I think we may see four and three cents for vByte any time today. 2:20 If you look, um, uh, you can see we have about 127 blocks worth of transactions left to, uh, to include into blocks, which means, uh, less than a day's worth of transactions are in the backlog. 2:34 So what we're seeing a lot of, uh, folks start to consolidate UTXOs. We're seeing, um, as I said last week, the uncommon goods, runes mint, uh, start to pump whenever fee rates go down. So we'll see. 2:47 We may have a lot of latent block space demand ahead of us, and, uh, we will see if the mempool does in fact clear before the Bitcoin 2024 conference. 2:59 Um, one of my new favorite sites is runes.com, just to kind of take a snapshot and look at the runes market. Um, just on the day, it's a bit... It's a mixed bag, not a whole lot of movement. 3:12 Dog is up, Bamf is down, Rsic is flat, Pups are up a bit. Um, but, uh, overall, Dog is down 50% from its all-time highs. Pups is down who knows what, like 80% or so. 3:29 Um, Billy, which was kind of the starring, you know, s- the, the, the winner of June, is also, uh, down 50% or so. Uh, but this is to be expected. These are reflexive assets in Bitcoin. These aren't meme coins. 3:43 These are altcoins. Uh, I will just sort this handy feature by holder count, where we see Uncommon Goods the number one, uh, owned, uh, rune by holder count, Runes X, Epic, Rsic, and Dog. 3:57 This is interesting because I think, uh, these are pretty much basic, uh... Th- this is an interesting snapshot to look at the holder base and how these holder bases have come to, uh, diversify. 4:08 Epic, uh, is the most recently airdropped rune. Um, it's the rune inscribed from the Epic Satoshi, which was bid on on ViaBT, uh, mined and bid on through B- ViaBTC's partner platform. 4:21 And we also see up here Lobo and Gobba decentralized. Um, this is a... These are pretty large holder counts, I would say. 4:29 Just for a novel ecosystem, we're looking at hundreds of thousands of people, um, who are owning these. Maybe it's just the same 100,000 people own all of them. 4:39 But, uh, you know, uh, there's not a l- whole lot of analytics that I think have developed for the ecosystem yet, so I'll be tracking this and talking about it as we go. 4:49 Also, just on the ordinals prices, yes, we're gonna look at this. Here's Magic Eden. Here's the seven-day view of the, uh, top 20 different ordinals assets. 5:03 And, um, for the first time in months, over half of the top 10, uh, collections are green on the week. So that is actually the first... 5:14 The, the top five collections are all green on the week: Runestone, NodeMonkes, Puppets, Cats, and OMB. Then Frogs, Blob, Billy, and Zebit down. Based Angels, a new entrance, uh, from the Ramillio 5:28 folks, the, the Milady gang, um, they are having a very popular and successful, uh, first week or two on Bitcoin. 5:37 But this is really interesting because we're seeing, uh, collections are green on the week, and this, this may signify a turning point. 5:44 I actually had tweeted about it, and I mentioned this in previous streams, like, it feels like the market, market had bottomed out. 5:50 Um, this is not a forward-looking financial statement, but I'm just more reading the vibes. I've been here a lot. It feels like we're ready to go up. And I mean, we're seeing this externally as well. 6:03 The, uh, Trump event this past weekend, combined with a market reaction where you are seeing-Um, really, really positive, uh, uh, reaction across most markets, especially crypto. 6:16 So, um, just looking at one dashboard here, it's Domo's, uh, marketplace dashboard, unique daily users by marketplace is ticking up. 6:27 The past three weeks, we have seen an increase in daily active users on Ordinals Marketplaces. This is somewhat bullish. It's just not maybe as bearish. 6:39 It still doesn't really amount to a, um, a giant influx of users, but it's about double from where it was a, a month ago. Um, going into, like, what's been happening during this bear market, 6:52 um, people are still building, and, uh, my personal favorite person who's been really just, like, taking off with productizing things and, uh, delivering interesting products to market is Lifo Fifo. 7:08 Some people say Lifo Fifo. Uh, he's got the Wizards of Ord collection, and, uh, he wants to announce that the Wizards of Ord website, uh, he's been working on for half a year is finally finished. Uh, wizards.ord. 7:23 And this is kind of a tour de force in all of the novel tools, and Lifo has really l- like, led the field across the board, um, for all the things you can build. 7:36 Um, he lists his collections here, Wizards, Rain, Nakamoto Archives, Simtap, Dgen Loops, and also the two products he has led building. Rune Blaster, which is this kind of mass minting tool. 7:48 Again, there's a few of these. Rune Blaster's a really, really good one, well-designed, and Magic Pool, which is a, um, mempool-aware, uh, site with some sniping options. Sniping was also another notable topic this week. 8:03 A user had extremely painful experience trying to sell on Magic Eden, and that, uh, sale was sniped even though they had used the Magic Eden's mempool sniping, uh, protection, uh, tool. 8:18 This has spawned an Ordinals show spaces, which is actually happening at this moment. I chimed in, um, talking about some of the ways this can be prevented and some of the ways that it cannot. 8:29 So this, uh, continues to be a narrative. Um, as I mentioned before, if the market goes up, 8:36 when the market goes up, that is the more optimal time for snipers to be sniping these ordinals and inscriptions because the me- the kind of assumption of sniping assumes that you can sell the asset for higher than you bought it at. 8:51 So it really only works when the market is moving upwards. So this is just a general cautionary to everyone who, uh, is excited for the market going up. This also means that sniping activity will be expected to increase. 9:05 So this is a very important time to educate yourself on where you may be vulnerable, what type of mechanisms and marketplace exchanges you might be vulnerable to when exchanging these assets, so you can reduce the surface area and risk for when you might be sniped. 9:23 Going on to other Ordinals building news, Raph, um, and Casey finally got back to working on Ord. As Raph says, "It's been a while, but we have finally released a-- We finally have a new release of Ord. 9:37 The biggest feature is a full address index, allowing users to query aggregated information of a u- of an address's UTXOs and assets therein." 9:46 This is the first, uh, release of Ord in, I think, two months, and the first full version release, that is, uh, not with a sub number, but, uh, going from 18 to 19 in several months. 9:58 So, um, as you can see, you c- uh, they've added inscriptions to the address page, so you can look up an address on ordinals.com and see the inscriptions. 10:07 Um, they added some basic, you know, small quality life features, and I think one of my favorite understated one is add a charm to burned inscriptions. So if an inscription was burned or sent to op return, 10:19 uh, it will have a charm. If you don't know what the charms are, charms are really just an ordinals.com thing, which hasn't yet been adopted by the rest of the ecosystem, where it's like an emoji 10:29 on the page of that inscription. So, um, this PR comes from OnChainGuy-BTC. Um, so glad to see Casey and Raph get back into it. 10:43 Uh, they des- have a well-- they enjoyed a well-deserved break from really working on Ord, doing Ordinals Coding Clubs. They really, uh, white-knuckled it into the Runes launch at the having. 10:54 You know, it might seem like Runes have been out for forever, but they've only been out for, like, uh, for two and a half months. So remember the, the kind of young ecosystem we're at here. Moving on to the last topic. 11:10 Um, one thing that I've not talked very much about here, and that I haven't really seen talked about very much from an analytics standpoint in Ordinals, is the landscape of Ordinals leverage. 11:23 As the old adage goes, "Liquor, ladies, and leverage are the ways to ruin." And we see this, the Dgen camp, uh, also experiences this. I'm certain leverage is, uh, is a major factor. Um, 11:40 some people love this idea of DeFi on Bitcoin, which to most people just means being able to lend against certain assets and earn yield. 11:49 Yield implies some risk somewhere, um, and the risk is being captured by a lot of people who have been lending their assets. 11:58 So the, the default for the ecosystem is Liquidium, and so there's a dashboard, uh, from user shoodofhadzow on Geniidata. I think this dashboard is mostly correct. 12:10 There are some discrepancies I've discovered, but I'm just gonna go over this. Um, if you're watching this, it's easier to see. If you're not watching this, I'll try to describe. Here's an Ordinals loan collection stats. 12:21 I have them sorted by the amount of-Volume overall that these collections have done, 12:29 um, and the collection that has done the most in volume on Liquidium, that is people been lending-- putting up their assets for lending, is, uh, NodeMonkes. 12:41 NodeMonkes and Puppets are, uh, roughly equal, about two sixty, two eighty Bitcoin, I think. Let me check this again. No, sorry, three hundred and twenty or so Bitcoin in assets total lended from those collections. 12:58 Um, OMB, Cats, OMB Orange, then Green, then Runestone, RSIC, Frogs, Opium. Um, so we're seeing significant volume. 13:06 Liquidium themselves says there's been over a hundred and thirteen dollars-- a hundred and thir- a hundred- a hundred and thirteen million dollars in assets, uh, lended. 13:16 Um, and the collections which have been lended against the most, uh, are-- kind of follow the collections by market cap. Your 10Ks, NodeMonkes, Puppets, and OMBs are gonna be the largest by volume. 13:29 But if we dig in a little bit further, we can see some interesting things. I'm going to sort this chart by default amount. 13:42 That means let's look at which collections have had the most defaulting against them on Liquidium, and then we get to see a little more interesting activity. It's gonna look almost the same. Let me see here. 14:01 Um, it's, it's gonna look almost the same. Um, but we, uh, it looks like the people who have been defaulting the most are, um, typically indicative of... 14:19 Hold on, let me make sure this is correct. Okay, so if we look at the number of def-defaults by collection, the chart looks a little bit different. 14:33 At the top we have Runestone, then Puppets, then RSIC, then NodeMonkes. And if we, and if we think about this, this actually passes the gut check. 14:40 Um, the mo-most of these collections have had the farthest and most dramatic drop during this Ordinals bear market. Runestone, Puppets, RSIC, and NodeMonkes have-- are down sixty to eighty percent each. 14:54 So when you have a loan-to-value ratio of one to, you know, two x, um, an eighty percent drawdown basically creates a margin call for your loan, and, uh, that puts that up for risk of, uh, going to the lender. So, um, 15:12 this-- the, the loan defaults on Liquidium are almost a leaderboard of which collections have drawn down the furthest. Um, so this is not really a surprise. 15:24 I do think that, um, there is some interesting insights you can get from this, which I will dive deeper into in the newsletter on Blockspace newsletter tomorrow. But, um, I would just look at this and say, 15:38 uh, many of these are collections I would love to have for a long time. And, uh, it's as if, like, the ecosystem has not learned that, um, 15:49 it-- one of the hardest things to do when holding these assets over a volatile bull market is just to not lose them. 15:56 And when you, when you loan, I feel like a parent chastising their kid a bit, but, like, when you loan these out, uh, you are subject, you know, opening yourself up to the, the reality that you might not pay it back and lose it. 16:10 So, um, I would just like to say going forwards, and when the market is going up and you feel that urge to lend that asset out and further leverage yourself, think twice a bit. 16:22 Because, um, if you consider Bitcoin as the most safe, conservative crys-crypto asset, these digital assets, these Ordinals inscriptions on top of Bitcoin are basically a beta play to Bitcoin. 16:33 When Bitcoin goes up, they go up more. When Bitcoin goes down, they go down more. Bake this into your risk profile. 16:40 So I'll be doing a little bit further deeper analysis on the, like, what I'm seeing as far as loan amounts, uh, and, like, default activity over the past two months, 'cause I thought-- I think we got to see a fairly mature Ordinals ecosystem really pull back and have significant volume of defaults across the board. 16:59 So without further ado, going on to the last thing, which is looking forwards. Looking forwards, we have Inscribing Nashville next week. Um, that's the precursor, uh, uh, uh, conference to the Bitcoin 2024 conference. 17:17 I'll be there. Blockspace Media will be there. We'll be doing some live interviews at Inscribing Nashville in the back. Um, Inscribing Nashville has the who's who. 17:26 It's got Casey, Trevor, Udi, Aaron, Raph, Nick, Jan, Parker, Brian, Danny, Ryandel, Amanda, me, Violetta, San0. It's everybody. So make sure you're there. 17:36 Um, if you're not there, we will be creating content and doing interviews with a lot of these folks at the event and having a pretty quick turnaround so you can watch those soon. 17:49 Otherwise, um, relating to the Bitcoin 2024 conference, I've managed to only reference the Trump assassination attempt this past weekend once. 17:57 Um, if you were worried, Trump is going to be attending the Bitcoin 2024 conference. So David Bailey, uh, head of Bitcoin Magazine BC- and BC Media, uh, says he's spoken with the former pres- f-former president's team. 18:12 He is, quote, "in good spirits and excited to see you all in Nashville and deliver a speech that is heard around the world." It's going to be a madhouse. 18:22 So I look forwards to hearing any politician say anything, uh, endorsing or pro-Bitcoin and broader crypto. It appears that this is becoming a core part of Trump and the RNC writ large's, uh, position. 18:37 So glad to see more politicians and institutionalists in favor of crypto. So without that, without further ado, thank you so much for joining Bitcoin Season Two. Um, this airs on Monday afternoons. 18:52 Make sure to sh-check out other Blockspace Media products, uh, Gort Show, Mining Pod, and our newsletter. And we will see you in Nashville. Check you all later. 19:04 [outro music]
