Ordinals have catalyzed a renewed interest in the Bitcoin ecosystem among developers. Fortunately, Stacks projects have been able to capitalize on this and have played a key role in shipping infrastructure and tooling for the Ordinals market.
This leads to the question of, what are the opportunities for Ordinals on the Stacks network? While this post doesn’t fully explore this topic, it does focus on one area of development that is needing community discussion: sOrds (Pronounced Swords)
Below is an overview of how the sBTC system could be used to support Peg-In / Peg-out for Ordinals. We’re seeking feedback to help validate the business case and product requirements for sORDS. We believe that Ordinals are worth paying very close attention to with regard to sBTC. We’re seeking a clearer product-market fit story for sOrds and why the community should prioritize these features.
If you are a developer building on Ordinals, we’d love to hear from you about the specific use cases this would enable and any tooling or infrastructure that would be needed.
sOrds Overview:
The sBTC system has the potential to support peg-in/peg-out for ordinals. By requesting that Stackers record the ordinal address of a pegged-in satoshi and verifying the ownership, the sbtc contract can mint an NFT for that ordinal. When the wrapped satoshi is pegged out, the contract would destroy the associated NFT, reflecting the transfer of that particular satoshi out of the system.
The trust assumptions for ordinals are the same as those for sBTC, with users trusting that any peg-in or peg-out transaction on Bitcoin happens with 70% of the Stackers’ support.
Strategic Rationale:
The market for Ordinals continue to gain momentum and mindshare. It’s a strategic imperative for Stacks to align closely with it given the potential product-market fit opportunity.
Specifically, a deeper integration with Ordinals has the following benefits:
- Unlock new features for Ordinals. Ordinals is currently limited to Bitcoin script, so by leveraging more expressive tooling on Stacks it could fill the current gap in the market better than alternatives.
- Draw more BTC liquidity into the Stacks ecosystem through Ordinals trading. The market size for Ordinals is likely in the Billions of $USD. This could be a big potential boom to the Stacks NFT ecosystem.
- Bridge the narrative between Ordinals innovation and Stacks. This is beneficial to expand the market for ordinals and capitalize on Ordinals market momentum.
Risks:
- Diffusion of focus for the core engineering team. There is already a tight deadline to ship sBTC and we want to be mindful of scope creep.
- Lack of business product requirements. The core protocol team may not be privy to the specific features needed for sOrds. This could lead to inefficiency or development of the wrong features. More research is needed to validate the business requirements to make sure the product is built to meet the market demand.
We could potentially mitigate both of these concerns by outsourcing to a 3rd party team that has a business need for this tech.
Open Questions:
- What specific business opportunities will sOrds enable? What is the primary use case in the short term?
- What sorts of tooling is needed to enable sOrds?
- Is a consensus critical change needed?
- How would this approach integrate with existing collections?
Any thoughts greatly appreciated 