The emergence Ordinals in the Bitcoin blockchain signals a return to the network of “creator culture,” says Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.
He voiced such view in a discussion with Eric Wall and Udi Wertheimer, prominent supporters of the first cryptocurrency. The topic of the conversation was the question “What can Bitcoiners learn from Ethereum?”.
The launch of the protocol for digital artifacts and the BRC-20 token standard, Buterin described as a rejection of stagnation in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
“Ordinals are beginning to bring back a culture of real deeds. It feels like there is a tangible pushback against the ‘laser eyes’ movement, which is a good thing,” he said.
Regarding scalability, Wall noted that Lightning Network is not a solution here. According to him, the network often stalls when processing “even medium-sized payments.”
Buterin suggested that the best approach would be to focus on implementing various forms of second-layer solutions, as well as finding ways to improve the efficiency of Bitcoin’s base layer.
“I think focusing on rollups is a good thing, so I am open to scaling solutions based on ZK-snark,” he added.
Wertheimer acknowledged that the rollout of rollups could lead to interesting side effects such as the emergence of an execution environment and the possibility of creating smart contracts.
Orthodox Bitcoin supporters criticize attempts to extend functionality atop the Bitcoin blockchain, including NFTs or smart contracts. In their view, various innovations blur the supposed primary function — serving as a peer-to-peer payment network. Some, such as Samson Mow, CEO of Jan3, argue that Ordinals waste block space.
Wall pointed to a similar stance and noted that Bitcoin could serve as a settlement layer for zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), which would not overload the network.
“My view is that we always wanted to do DeFi-adjacent things, but so that the base layer of Bitcoin simply acts as a kind of referee or arbiter of these computations, rather than executing them on the blockchain,” Wall said.
As reported, the Swiss project ZeroSync Association is developing tools to scale the Bitcoin network based on ZKP.