Some reflections on the industry after working on the Bitcoin NFT project for 3 months

Author: Cookie

When the Ethereum NFT circle was hit by Azuki Elementals, the Bitcoin NFT circle gradually faded from the BRC-20 and recursive small picture craze and entered a relatively quiet period again.

As @0xjingle said, the "golden age" of Bitcoin NFTs is over. It's hard to say exactly when, after $OXBT became popular, a bunch of BRC-20 imitation disks that 100% copied its operating ideas appeared? When was the most "successful" small picture project Bitcoin Bears that adopted a whitelist mechanism and successfully "eat" nearly 30 bitcoins? Is it when a large number of anonymous project parties started to appear, buying a bunch of fake Twitter fans to make Hype? Or is it when various BRC-XX agreements are flying all over the sky to hype the first projects of many "BRC-XX agreements" and then they are all over the place?

Free, fair distribution, First is first... These buzzwords in the Bitcoin NFT circle a few months ago have been buried in the short history of Bitcoin NFT without knowing it. The "golden age" of Bitcoin NFT is so short. In that short period of 2-3 months, developers selflessly did technical maintenance and innovation for this ecology. Different ideals have started their own projects in an ecology that is not very popular and has no profit path. There is no superior party between the players and the project parties, but to return to an equal friendship...

Originally, the topic of this article would be "What changes in the market are reflected in the popularity of the whitelist mechanism in the Bitcoin NFT circle", but soon, I realized that this is very likely to be a reflection of the past "golden age". nostalgia. The past is already the past, and what is more important is the present. **In the face of the Bitcoin NFT market that has fallen into silence again and even the entire Crypto bear market, what kind of mentality do Bitcoin NFT project parties with no income have now? What are they going to do? **

How hard is it to "run" without eating grass? And why?

Over the past half month, insomnia has become a habit of mine. I used to hug my wife, and after she fell asleep, I quietly walked out of the room and sat in the dark. I don't know what to do. I usually turn on the TV and Switch, mute them, and play with my head in a mess for about 10 minutes. Then, Link slumped on the sofa and watched the TV in a daze, turned off the TV, and went to the balcony to smoke a lot of cigarettes.

Working in Rhythm allowed me to get in touch with the Ordinals protocol very early, and it also allowed me to take the first step in my own project from the "Keyboard Man" who pointed out the country to various projects. In March, I launched my own Bitcoin NFT project, Bitcoin Pizzas. Although, from the bottom of my heart, I don't use "project party" to call myself.

My friends call me Cookie, and they tell me, Cookie, you've made it, don't think too much about it. In a sense, I may have succeeded.

Because of "it's cool to do this" and trust in me, I successfully gathered pizzab0y, FyFk, and Ssyan to turn Bitcoin Pizzas from a brain hole into a real project. At that time, Ordinals was just born in February, and I was very anxious to find someone to implement the idea of "pizza", but the ready-made resources were either completely unfamiliar with the Ordinals protocol, or felt that the benefits were completely out of proportion to the investment. Everyone wants to make money. It is really not easy for me to find 3 other people to do things together without expecting anything in return. Maybe this is a kind of success.

The transaction volume of this project is close to 11 bitcoins. We did it with the mentality of "I believe everyone will see it" at the beginning, but on the day when FOMO came, everyone's first reaction was not to be elated, but to feel pressure. No matter how FOMO the market is, we can't get a dime from the rapidly growing turnover. The rising price will inevitably push up some holders' expectations of us, but we don't have any benefits to do more things. However, the community never scolded us, but instead gave us a lot of spiritual support, and even took out their own small pictures to support us in marketing. Considering we didn't have any whitelists and only had a mere 300 Twitter followers at launch, maybe that counts as a success.

But I always think that I have never been successful, because success is used to describe the end of one thing in my opinion.

The market is changing rapidly, and the hotspots are switching very quickly. I am very worried about the loss of "pizza's" attention, and this is actually happening. I don't know what to do about it, because we don't have money.

I have spent tens of thousands of dollars to do this, but I still have no way to give any return to my friends who trust me. Even though they told me more than once that money is really not important, and they are not going to starve to death, but when I saw that our illustrator successfully raised thousands of yuan for another cartoon image of herself in Moments When it comes to money, I get really anxious. I had an argument with FyFk because of anxiety and he felt I was starting to "call the shots like a boss" and he was just doing it for fun.

We rejected the possible ways to make money in this circle including the issuance of BRC-20 Token, the follow-up project Paid Mint, etc., because we feel that this matter may not be an NFT project at the beginning, but a real action against PUA, Taking money and not doing things seriously, etc. It is a performance art of protest against phenomena we hate.

What else can you do without money? In addition to updating a "GM" picture with the image of "Pizza" on Twitter every day, and occasionally warm community members help us make some memes and videos, we really can't do more. This actually leads to a paradox - for projects like Azuki that have taken so much money, they can and should do more content that can unite the community and even exert commercial value, but these content seem so inappropriate for them to make money important. But for a project like ours, the only way we can effectively energize the community, and even sustain attention, is precisely the content. Because a small picture is a small picture, if there is no content that can make the community discuss, what else can the community expect everyone to talk about except that this goes up and that goes down?

I shared my life in an “abstract” way in the community and even on my personal Twitter. We had some memes, which allowed us to get rid of the predicament of “a picture at the beginning” without saying anything, but this Not enough.

After half a month of thinking, I decided to "abstract" and run the traffic of my personal Twitter account and try to sell some peripherals. This should be the only way we can think of to "make money standing up". For those of us with no experience in this area, it was tough. What we have to learn and worry about includes but is not limited to whether the style is good-looking, whether the quality can pass the test, how to control the cost... In fact, it is not important to us to sell more or less in the end, because we once again put this The move is considered "experimental art of resistance performance". **Projects that take a lot of money and don't do things should be ashamed if we've made something that everyone is happy with without any income and with such limited resources. **They won't even know that there is such a "brother among brothers" as "Pizza", but it doesn't matter, we are just tired of using the keyboard to express our dissatisfaction, and we need to fight back with practical actions.

This is the reason for "running without eating grass". Of course, there's another reason, **we have to do something to make this project feel alive. **Of course we can also comfort ourselves, what we wanted to do at the beginning has been done, and no one will say anything when we lie down, especially in such a bear market, it is better to relax after get off work than to do a bunch of things that no one will see Maybe it's better. But... let's do it anyway.

The "grassroots" who are struggling to explore the road of development

After starting my own Bitcoin NFT project, I was lucky to meet many friends who are doing small picture projects on Bitcoin as a "project party".

Blueberry (@aowu2048) is the founder of Pixelbirds Sparrow, the first Bitcoin small picture project in the Chinese circle. Blueberry is a developer, and did this project purely because of his interest in the Ordinals protocol. Outside of this project, he has a mature team who have made NFT-related attempts on Ethereum before. He once told me that Pixelbirds Sparrow is like a "DLC (game expansion pack)" to him. It doesn't mean that the project is pulled down after it is successfully launched, but that whether the project makes money is not that important to him. . Because of interest, the launch of Pixelbirds Sparrow is also fair and free, which is the model that old Bitcoin NFT players were familiar with—all those who like the project can download their favorite pictures on the official website and burn them by themselves.

Blueberry has always wanted to do more for the Ordinals ecology at the technical level. He helped Bitcoin Knight, Pixel Hares and other projects complete the launch at the technical level, and hopes to turn this help into a Launchpad product, and then turn this product into a part of Pixelbirds Sparrow's empowerment for holders. At this year's Pizza Festival, I also tried the "Open Edition" of the BRC-1155 protocol with him. Blueberry, Ivan (the developer of BRC-1155) and I have discussed a lot in private how to develop BRC-1155, but for us who all have our own jobs, the development is very difficult, not only to perfect BRC-1155 It is also necessary to promote trading markets such as Magic Eden and wallet applications such as UniSat on the market side to adapt to this protocol. There are also many trivial things that need to be discussed and refined, such as the specific implementation of the Burn function and so on. We are not working as a team in the strict sense, and we cannot make strict requirements for efficiency.

ACE (@CKN_ACEE) is the founder of Bitcoin Knight. He designed the logo for UniSat and the BRC-20 project $VMPX of $XEN founder Jack Levin. Because of his love for Ordinals, he made a pixel version of the project he once posted on Cardano and airdropped it to the original holders, trying to bring more players into the Bitcoin NFT circle. Last week, the launch of Bitcoin Knight V2 was successfully completed, and about 3 bitcoins of development funds were raised in the public sale. Jokingly, ACE is less "grassroots" than me and blueberries.

ACE understands the matter of "charging" in this way-NFT is a kind of entertainment consumption, and it is a dessert after a full main course. Essentially, once the money-to-picture conversion is complete, the delivery is over. Bitcoin Knight's central idea from the very beginning is to lower the user's expectations. Don't think too much. He believes that this is a benign growth method, and over-delivery will satisfy the emotional value of the holders. When airdropping the first-generation Bitcoin pixel version to the original Bitcoin Knight holders, ACE also emphasized that this is just a gift. This gift may be worthless, but it is worth at least 1 satoshi, Just take it.

Regarding the funds raised by the public sale, ACE said that it is enough to implement the protocol BRC-721K they want to do. This is a pledge protocol for small Bitcoin images. In addition to improving some problems of BRC-20 Token, BRC-721K can also deploy a "lottery ticket" to improve the liquidity of small images. To put it simply, you can use the NFT you want to sell as a "prize" to attract interested players to buy "lottery tickets" to participate in the lottery. Compared with rolling the floor and waiting for a transaction, this may be a quick way to sell yourself The path to the small image.

CXEEO (@CXEEO_) is Neo Yauto's artist and COO of the project. Unlike Blueberry, ACE and my project, Neo Yauto issued BRC-20 Token first, and then issued small pictures. Like Bitcoin Knight, CXEEO and his team previously had a successful project on other chains, his previous project was NUO2069 on Ethereum.

CXEEO said that Neo Yauto will not make money after switching to Bitcoin ecological development. What they want to do is not much different from what they used to do on Ethereum. They still want to create a city IP with Cantonese culture and Cantonese culture - "New Demon City". They have outlined a city map of the parallel universe on the chain, and will then issue a "citizen card" to their own holders and holders of other cooperative projects. At the same time, this is also the key to open the next stage of Xinyaodu, gradually building an Ordinals multiverse and enriching the story of this virtual city, so that the Ordinals ecology can form interactions here. They are planning a large-scale offline event, hoping to connect Web2 through the event, and see what kind of chemical reaction will be produced when the virtual Guangzhou on the chain lands in the real Guangzhou.

This is a big goal. CXEEO admitted frankly that it needs money, but what he wants to do at this stage is difficult to realize. Therefore, they created a Launchpad called Spark, hoping to feed back the development of Neo Yauto through the income from project launch and incubation. At present, Japan's IP ACG WORLDS and many other projects have cooperated with Spark. This idea is actually quite similar to ACE. ACE also believes that the future development of Ordinals should be To B rather than To C. They all want to use the influence of their projects to help entities that want to enter the Bitcoin ecosystem to incubate new projects. At this stage, CXEEO and his team are still relatively indifferent to the matter of making money, because it is useless to force in a bear market, just do what you have in hand.

In addition to the project team of the three small pictures, I also interviewed a developer other than the small picture project team, his name is Da Da.

Da Da (@ordinalsda) was deeply involved in the construction of BRC-20 in the early days. When BRC-20 was first born, he maintained communication with BRC-20 developer domo and made many suggestions. What Dada is planning is a tool that is more convenient for developers to implement the BRC-20 protocol on the Bitcoin ecosystem. Through this tool, developers can easily implement their ideal protocol, even if they never understand BRC-20. Developers of the 20 protocol can also get started quickly and do not need to spend energy to develop supporting facilities such as indexes.

I have this idea because BRC-20 has not yet had a complete governance system. Many ideas that can improve BRC-20 cannot be realized through proposals. Everything depends on the idea of domo. Instead of sitting still and waiting for the governance system of BRC-20 to be perfected, what should be done is to further pave the way for more good ideas to be implemented. If BRC-20 maintains the status quo, the consensus will not stay on BRC-20 but will migrate with the emergence of better and more complete technologies.

Conclusion

The Azuki incident caused many original loyal Azuki holders to issue "eschatology"-the belief in NFT collapsed. It is understandable, after all, they have been hurt like "the person I love the most hurts me the most". However, as a "pure diaosi" project party, I still want to stand up and speak my mind.

Azuki's "disruption" is not the complete obliteration of trust in the entire NFT market. In fact, there are still many people who are serious about doing things, but they may not even have the chance to be seen by a small number of players like us small project parties. In many groups, I saw a lot of voices like this - the currency circle is about money, about feelings of chicken feathers. I'm sure that quite a few of these voices don't come from the holder of Azuki, and I still feel a little uncomfortable after being beaten to death.

When you come to the currency circle, you must want to make money, but which circle do you want to go to and don’t want to make money? It is nothing more than insisting on "making money standing up" or "harvesting" regardless of the bottom line. There must be a way to "make money standing up" besides Pond's digging out players' pockets by stepping on their left foot and stepping on their right foot. Pudgy Pengunis, who has been discussed recently, has begun to take off the "long gown" of "NFT", earnestly makes content and sells toys. The "little ghost" Weirdo Ghost Gang in the Chinese circle has also been mentioned more, and it is using music to mark its own "IP" as a memory point. **We can even say back to Azuki, its disillusionment is not the disillusionment of its proposed vision, but it simply didn't do it well. **

**If the withering of Azuki is to make players have stricter requirements on the project side, is it possible that this is also the beginning of a great purification of the NFT circle where "good coins drive out bad coins"? From now on, the project party may be required to meet stricter ethical standards, or the funds raised will be managed more strictly, **For example, the income from the initial sales will be lowered, and the income will be controlled through the contract use etc. This reminds me of a stalk that will appear in many live broadcast rooms, "Bosses, don't feed the anchor too much, or the broadcast will stop again."

Idealism will not die, NFT will get better and better, so good that one day, the word "NFT" will not even appear in my article. At the end of this time, I can no longer say "I look forward to it", because I am also doing some trivial things. Thinking of this, I felt as satisfied as if I had eaten a cow.