If the ecosystem of the first cryptocurrency continues to expand, demand growth could push Bitcoin to an ATH of around $100,000 in the forthcoming bull market. This is stated in a Bitget Research report obtained by ForkLog.
“Given the future macroeconomic conditions and market state, the Bitcoin network presents a promising outlook. Not only popular cryptocurrencies, such as BTC and ORDI, have significant potential for price growth, but the ecosystem itself will also present new opportunities to create 100x coins,” the experts said.
Despite a sharp rise in trading volume on the Bitcoin-NFT market, its current scale remains relatively small, analysts note. This condition suggests potential for more than a hundredfold growth of the sector in the future.
According to Bitget’s forecasts, in the next bull cycle, as the leading coin of the digital-gold ecosystem, ORDI will enter the top-30 by market capitalization.
At the time of writing, the meme token’s market cap stands at over $1.27 billion, while daily trading volume has also surpassed $1.2 billion. The asset’s price is around $61, having risen about 180% over the month.
Protocols Ordinals, Atomicals, or Taproot Assets also expect possible expansion and growth, analysts added.
According to the dashboard Dune, in recent months the number of daily inscriptions created on average exceeds 100,000.
To date, almost 48 million Bitcoin-NFTs have been issued in total, for which about $157 million has been spent in fees.
“In the short term, the blockchain will retain the status ‘one project — one protocol solution’, fostering project diversity. A Bitcoin Virtual Machine is likely to emerge in the ecosystem,” Bitget concluded.
Moreover, the Ordinals launch has significantly improved miners’ position over the last three months, experts added. The share of protocol revenues rose from 1.7% in August to a peak of 19.57% in November.
“However, Ordinals, offering new capabilities for the network, brings with it issues. The platform operates by embedding data in individual transactions, occupying significant space in blocks and increasing the difficulty of using the blockchain,” the report states.
Bitget also believes that the Lightning Network could become the “main technological backbone” for broad Bitcoin payments adoption, thanks to near-instant transfers and the ability to make microtransactions.
However, creating and maintaining channels on the Lightning Network is more complex than transacting on the main network, which raises the initial barrier to entry for users.
Finally, the experts highlighted two problems facing the Bitcoin ecosystem that could slow its development. First, limited scalability of the network hampers the deployment of applications, creating bottlenecks and potentially affecting overall growth.
Second, Bitcoin Core developers are mostly conservative and skeptical of non-standard protocols.
Earlier, one of Bitcoin pioneers Luke Dash — the younger criticised Ordinals for cluttering the network and called for censorship of BRC-20 transactions.
Earlier in December, the U.S. National Vulnerability Database tagged the inscriptions created in the protocol as a cybersecurity threat to the Bitcoin blockchain.