Over 90,000 Ordinals have been inscribed — which is jargon for created (or minted) — on the Bitcoin blockchain to date, according to Dune Analytics data. Ordinals hit an all-time high on February 9 for the number of mints at over 20,000 that day.

So, inherently Bitcoin NFTs will compete with other major NFT ecosystems, Hansen said. “I think we’ll most likely see a lot of Ethereum NFT projects building bridges to move to Bitcoin.”

When people build on Bitcoin, it gets a lot more attention, Ali said. “Some people think it’s more valuable than other chains because it’s unclear if those other chains will be around, but bitcoin will likely be around in 10, 20 or 50 years from now.”

But this expansion won’t happen overnight, and the current infrastructure for Bitcoin NFTs is extremely clunky and still done manually on many fronts. For example, many people are legitimately completing inscriptions manually rather than through a service like an NFT marketplace.