Crypto Tycoon Arthur Hayes and BRC-20 Developer Domo Back Oyl’s $3 Million Funding for Bitcoin Ordinals Wallet

Arthur Hayes, the founder of BitMEX and an American cryptocurrency billionaire, has partnered with the anonymous developer Domo, who is the creator of the Bitcoin BRC-20 token standard, in a $3 million pre-seed funding round for the Bitcoin Ordinals wallet Oyl.

The funding round was led by crypto asset manager Arca, with additional support from Kanosei and FlamingoDAO.

Oyl is set to launch in the upcoming weeks and will provide “in-wallet” trading for Ordinals. Ordinals introduces NFT capabilities to Bitcoin by allowing data inscriptions on individual satoshis, which are the smallest units of Bitcoin, analogous to cents in a dollar.

A variety of data types can be inscribed on satoshis, including images, videos, audio, and even a basic DOOM clone.

Building on the Ordinals innovation, Domo’s BRC-20 token standard enables the creation of tokens through data inscriptions on satoshis.

While similar to the ERC-20 standard utilized on Ethereum by major players such as Tether, Uniswap, Polygon, Chainlink, and Shiba Inu, BRC-20 notably lacks one essential feature of its Ethereum counterpart: advanced smart contracts.

Nonetheless, despite being released for free by its creator, it is attracting significant attention and interest, highlighting the advantages of open-source collaboration, a core principle of the cryptocurrency space.

Bitcoin Ordinals And Beyond

Ordinals may play an increasingly vital role in the Bitcoin network’s economy following the upcoming halving event. The halving, a quadrennial occurrence expected on April 19 this year, reduces the block rewards for Bitcoin miners by half.

This effectively reduces both mining revenues and the generation of new Bitcoin by half. Historically, when demand has remained steady, as seen in the previous three halvings, the price tends to rise.

This halving appears to follow the same trend, with substantial institutional demand for Bitcoin following the January launch of eleven Bitcoin ETFs. The leading cryptocurrency recently reached a new all-time high of $69,255.77, according to CoinGecko, although it has since retraced to a trading price of $67,962.06 at the time of this writing.

Moreover, transaction fees from Ordinals will provide a significant alternative revenue source for miners, currently constituting approximately 20% of their earnings.

In early March 2024, Bitcoin NFTs achieved $168.5 million in sales over a week, surpassing Ethereum NFTs, which recorded $162 million during the same timeframe.

In addition to Ordinals, Bitcoin now boasts a thriving layer 2 network, enhancing the blockchain’s scalability and speed across various applications. These layer 2 solutions enable Bitcoin to offer functionalities similar to those of Ethereum, the most commercially significant blockchain.

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