OKX announced that it’s adding support for Atomicals (ARC-20), Stamps (SRC-20), Runes, and Dogecoin’s Doginals (DRC-20) to its platform, with plans to launch a marketplace in the near future.
OKX says that it will integrate the bitcoin token standard SRC-20 for viewing and transferring inscription standards on February 5, followed by the integration of ARC-20, DRC-20, and Runes standards in late February.
OKX Wallet’s inscriptions tool currently supports inscriptions minting on 23 networks, including Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Ethereum, Polygon, BNB Chain, Avalanche-C, Arbitrum One, and a number of others.
Inscriptions have taken off in the last year after first launching on the bitcoin blockchain. According to data from Dune, there are over 58 million inscriptions on the bitcoin blockchain, and $166.8 million spent on BRC-20 fees.
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While inscriptions have often been equated to Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), and exhibit many similar traits, they aren’t entirely the same. Inscriptions are recorded directly on-chain, whereas NFTs are simply a link between the blockchain and a jpeg or other file stored on a server.
“It’s not a Web2 link, it’s a pure Web3 product,” OKX’s Chief Innovation Officer Jason Lau said in an interview with CoinDesk.
Anyone who purchased an NFT via FTX’s marketplace learned this lesson in December 2022, as the ‘Web2 link’ between jpeg and chain broke as bankruptcy officials took over FTX’s servers, causing NFTs to go blank and links to point to pages announcing the bankruptcy.
“These things will last forever, as long as the chain lasts,” Lau said.
Lau sees inscriptions as a “new canvas” for Web3 creators.
“It’s been a little over a year since the first public ordinal and inscription was minted. And throughout that year, the community has really grown… I think of it as a new canvas,” he said. “I like to use the word canvas because users and creators and different developers get to pick what characteristics and features that they want and choose the change that makes sense.”
Lau gives the example of high-value, rare, or premium NFT collections going on bitcoin because of its premium block space and demand for high-quality ordinals and inscriptions. Whereas more accessible or mass-market projects, chains like Solana might be suitable, emphasizing the importance of having art and data immutably stored on-chain.
While Lau acknowledged that there’s a debate around inscriptions on the Bitcoin blockchain, he dismisses those who call it a waste or blockchain pollution as holding a fringe position.
“I think it really is a bitcoin maxi-driven sort of narrative,” he said. “Our perspective is more usage of bitcoin and more usage of bitcoin blockspace is good for the network.”
