What's This Brouhaha With Bitcoin Ordinals? w/ Elizabeth Olson

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1:30Welcome to the Real Vision Crypto Daily Briefing Show. I'm Elaine Lee, your friendly crypto host and producer. Rocking the BTC Orange today, as you can see, you know that we're going to have a little deep dive into the Bitcoin ordinals conversation. And here with me today, I have made a new Twitter friend who is going to tell me all about the growing Bitcoin Web3 wallet that we're seeing today. Elizabeth Olson, she is the head of growth at Xverse. Elizabeth, welcome to Real Vision. Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here. Elizabeth, I think I just want to start off by talking a little bit about your Twitter profile bio.

2:11I was looking into it. I read the word Sotheby's, which is covering luxury. And now you're in this space where you're just talking about Bitcoin wallet growth. I mean, how did you get into this space? Let's start a little bit talking about that, first of all. Sure. I do have a rather non-traditional entry into the Bitcoin space. I actually do come from the luxury sector. I was for many years at Steinway & Sons and then Sotheby's Auction House most recently, and I just saw all the exciting things happening in the Web3 space there. At the time, Sotheby's had just launched the Sotheby's Metaverse.

2:49A lot of the auctions I was working on had digital NFTs tied to the property, and even the U.S. Constitution was one of my auctions, and I saw that the Constitution DAO come through. So it was a really exciting time in the space, and I knew that I wanted to get involved directly and have a direct impact as soon as possible. So I was recruited for Xverse, where I am now. And I thought, what better place to start than a wallet where you get a seat at the center of all the action. So you get to have exposure to things like DeFi and NFTs and payments and all the many exciting things that the Web3 space has to offer.

3:28Wow, the constitutional doubt, that seemed almost like a lifetime ago now. and I remember that project really well. So you must have had a fascinating standpoint where you're seeing the digital goods coming in and the real true sense of ownership and what that means for the future of digital art. So a really good front seat. And now you're into this sort of universe and this ecosystem. I think I want to start just by talking to you, what exactly is an ordinal and why have they been so controversial? They're always on my Twitter timeline. Let's go a little bit into that. Sure. So ordinals are essentially Bitcoin NFTs.

4:07And what makes them so unique is that they're directly on chain. So unlike Ethereum NFTs, where you have IPFS, these are something that's directly uploaded, data directly uploaded to the Bitcoin-based layer. And so what we're doing to make that possible is we're uploading data. And that process is called inscribing. So we're inscribing this data directly onto a Satoshi. And a Satoshi is the smallest monetary unit of Bitcoin. You kind of think of it like a cent to a dollar. And once we have this data on the Satoshi, the Satoshi is now unique. So now we have a non-fungible token directly on Bitcoin.

4:46You know, Samantha Buhlman, who is our community member, who joins us every day. Hello, Samantha in Canada. She literally wrote, looking forward to learning about ordinals. I know nothing. You know, every day I come on the Twitter timeline, I see so many people. There's ordinal shows on Twitter now with, I think, Trevor.BTC. They're talking about Bitcoin and pizza every day. But so many people are just so still new to this space. And we're going to take you step by step through this video, how to sort of open up yourself to learning a little bit more about this ecosystem. I mean, so what's the controversial about it?

5:19I mean, I've read that some people said, you know, a lot of people in the Bitcoin community saying, oh, it's jamming up the network? Like what's the conversation there? Yeah, it is really interesting. There's been a lot of friction within the Bitcoin ecosystem. I would say in particular, there's a certain, I would say minority group of people who believe that Bitcoin should only be used as a sound money layer, kind of like gold. You hoard it, you look at it, you watch it grow. But ultimately, Bitcoin to survive and to really reach mass adoption, we actually need to make Bitcoin usable in a way that we can scale it and have all different kinds of solutions like DeFi and NFTs.

6:02So this is actually really good for Bitcoin. So I would say there are definitely some legitimate concerns around the congestion of the blockchain, but ultimately, ordinals are just another door to enforce us to face these issues and make Bitcoin scalable. So we're seeing a whole new wave of talent. And that's what I'm most excited about is the talent and the funding, the VCs that are now looking at Bitcoin thanks to Ordinals. Yeah, no. And we've spoken about the growth of the Bitcoin ecosystem here on Real Vision. And it just, you know, when we talk about how culture is the new investment class, this is the opportunity again.

6:39And I want to bring up this little photo because, you know, I'm a Twitter stalker ultimately. Take a look at this photo here that I see of you with Peter Schiff here. who was a massive Bitcoin critic. And now he was all into the Bitcoin Web3 ecosystem. What's going on there? Where did you meet him? Where did you hang out? Yes. So that was just a few weeks ago in New York City. Peter Schiff heard about Bitcoin NFTs, and he is known as being one of the biggest Bitcoin critics out there. So it's so interesting. He has an artist friend. And I think for fun, they thought, why not we launch a collection on Bitcoin.

7:15You know, I think there's, you know, what is true gold here? Is it the physical metal or is it Bitcoin? And Bitcoin is known as being this digital store value for gold. So I think he thought it would be an interesting project to launch this collection. So it was a collection of, I believe, 50 prints and they're sold out. I think he did well. And so we'll see what happens. I mean, I think everybody is being kind of orange filled right now coming to the Bitcoin ecosystem. You know, we're seeing people from Ethereum, from Solana, from all different chains, and even a lot of bridges being made within the Bitcoin ecosystem between these extremist people who believe it should only be used for gold sound money, basically, versus actually making it usable.

8:03And that's what ordinals are doing. It's not making change to Bitcoin itself, but that's what's so wonderful. Bitcoin is permissionless and people will find new ways to innovate. Yeah, I just think the space is way too small in the digital asset world to having all kinds of drama. But, you know, what's interesting to me when you're telling me about this is I remember having one of our guests, Brian Estes, on the Real Vision platform. And I think this was like almost two years ago when he goes, oh, Elaine, you know, I've got a Bitcoin NFT. And I was like, what's a Bitcoin NFT? And he was telling me that he got one of those Playboy NFTs.

8:39And I remember the Playboy collection was on. Yeah, I remember the Playboy NFT was on Bitcoin. So that's a small, small thing that I remember that brings into mind. Okay, so that's really interesting. So you are now with Xverse. Tell me a little bit more about Xverse. I mean, I log on to the website. I see it's the Bitcoin Web3 wallet. I've had a little play with it myself. I've downloaded it. What is it that you're actually growing over there and building? So you can kind of think of experts like a Bitcoin super wallet. We're offering everything that the Bitcoin Web3 space has to offer. So we're kind of like that gateway to the ecosystem.

9:20So not only payments, but also you can hold your Bitcoin NFTs in a beautiful gallery, which I'll be showing you in a little bit. You can also access Web3 dApps, decentralized applications on Bitcoin. So that means you can log in and directly connect your wallet to marketplaces, NFT marketplaces, where you can trade and swap. And then you can also connect to protocols like DeFi protocols and many other exciting new applications being built out. And another thing you can do is also stack tokens to earn Bitcoin rewards. So there's all different kinds of new features and exciting capabilities that we're unlocking in the Bitcoin ecosystem.

10:02Yeah. So Elizabeth, I remember when I first reached out to you on Twitter, I was like, hey, I really need someone to sort of have a conversation with me and tell me how to start going into this ecosystem. Because I think, okay, you know, the journey of stepping into NFTs is like your MetaMask wallet, get a bit of Ethereum, and then you, you know, go and buy whatever crap on there at OpenSea. And now I think, you know, you've seen so many other blockchains launching their own NFT market as well. Okay, cool. That's in the system as well. Gaming is taking a whole new revelation on chain, which is fascinating as well.

10:37But I mean, Ordinals, the more I went into the vortex, of course I opened up and stepped into the vortex myself, is okay, Bitcoin is Bitcoin. You know, it's just a different caliber of itself. So I think just taking looking back my own journey is I started with getting my ENS name, you know, blah, blah, Elaine.Eth. And that was like my first sort of ownership identity going into that ecosystem. And I recently registered for something myself called Elaine.Sats, which is a journey I did myself as well. So I think if you can show us a little bit through using the Xverse wallet, how to get your.btc domain, I would love to tell that with a little show and tell if you can.

11:24Absolutely. I think that's such a great way to get started in the ecosystem is to secure your Bitcoin identity, your Bitcoin username. And what I love about Xverse is that if you're coming from another chain like Ethereum and familiar with a wallet experience like Metamask or Phantom Wallet on Solano, if you come to Bitcoin, you'll find that Xverse is actually quite similar. We are available on iOS and Android as well as the Chrome browser extension. And yeah, let's go ahead and get started. I can kind of walk you through that process to secure your first Bitcoin username. name. So can you see my screen?

12:01Hey everyone, we're going to take a quick pause and hear our word from our partners. We'll be right back.

12:10Yes, I can. Ask that on Zoom calls. So can you see my screen? Did you pick up a British accent as well there? I'm going to be picking up. Can you see it? Okay, great. So here we have, if you go over to experts.app, this is our website and you can see where we're available to download and you can click download. I already have the wallet installed as a Chrome browser extension since I'm on my laptop right now. So I'll just go ahead up here, click on the browser extension and log in. I love seeing the longest password in the world. You know what? I think somehow I think I might need to unshare my screen to grab my password.

12:51We will give you all the patience to do that while I hang around with my community. we actually have one member where he texts his name all the time Tenemo Trader he said he has the X-verse wallet and he goes RV should define what an ordinal is we did you just missed the top of the show no I'm kidding but we have spoken a little bit about that let me pop into our YouTube space oh we're back good to share here we go We're in one of my accounts in my wallet firsthand. You get to see. And so here at the top, you'll see I have my Bitcoin username secured. And to do that, you're going to need to purchase some Stacks tokens.

13:41Stacks is a Bitcoin layer enabling all different kinds of applications secured directly on Bitcoin. And so all you have to do is go to a fiat on-ramp. And let's say I want to purchase Stacks. We have MoonPay, Binance, and Transact available. So you can easily on-ramp yourself, depending on whatever fiat currency you're coming from, and depending on where these fiat on-ramps are available in your country, and simply exchange, purchase some stacks. And then from there, we're going to go and navigate to btc.us. And here is where the fun begins. Elaine, what kind of username should we secure today?

14:26The degen in me would go blackrock.btc, but I think that's probably taken. Let's go for something. No, let's go for real. Let's see if BlackRock is available. It is unavailable. Of course it is, you degen. Someone has taken it. Let's put in real vision. Does that work? Real vision. Here we go. Okay. Oh, it's taken. I know someone in the community did it. I just know that this is the same. So smart like that. Okay. I did test your name yesterday. And so how do we test that? I'll send you a BTC after a paper. How much is it actually? So they're actually not that expensive. Oh, sorry. I do need to sign in to the account.

15:09Let's see. So first of all, you need to connect the wallet. Might need to. This is how brave we're being today on this video to do anything on crypto live. Definitely. Let's see if the connection works. Okay. I did connect the wallet. When I did my .sats one, it did take a while. You know what? I just did it. So for some reason, the connection is not coming through. GM Batsy. He's suggesting. He's trying to get a free Bitcoin domain name from us. We can still talk through the process. Oh, no, it's fine. Let's see. And if it doesn't work through, do also let me know and we can easily move on to the conversation.

16:04I think just letting people know the user face of Xverse and how to connect it to.btc is a lot of info there already. Right. Okay. Well, not sure why the connection is not going through, but normally what you do is you simply sign in, connect your wallet, and you're able to claim this username, which I am sure I can do right after this. Look, look, like this is something that you should do always by yourself anyway to concentrate like the correct names, the connection, the correct passwords. So, okay. So that's the sort of first journey. You feel like you belong more into the ecosystem now. I see you open up the Gamma.io page, create your digital legacy on Bitcoin.

16:50I mean, tell me a little bit, what is Gamma? Is that sort of like the NFT marketplace, like the OpenSea on Gamma is like the Bitcoin version? What is Gamma? Why do we have to, if we go down the Bitcoin ecosystem of exploring in Web3, why does Gamma come into our lives? Yeah, Gamma is a marketplace. It's also a wonderful launchpad for artists to launch their collections directly on Bitcoin. as well as Stacks Bitcoin layer. And a wonderful place for us to get started and create our first Bitcoin NFT. So same process here as you would with any other Bitcoin decentralized application. If you're connecting, you can just connect your wallet.

17:30And here, I think part of this is because my screen is not large. So I wonder if... Oh, there's our on-chain monkey friends. Yes. So let's see. if we go to create and create a new inscription, we'll have the option to select either a single image or text, or you can even upload multiple images. And just for simplicity today, we can go ahead and create some text here. And that's the wonderful thing. We are putting text. We're about to put text directly on the Bitcoin blockchain forever and ever. This is a forever database. So what we do here today will go down in history. I like that. Let's test fate again.

18:16Let's go for it. Let's test fate. I mean, should we put real vision in here? Hell yeah. Real vision. Anything about real vision that we should say? Now you're testing me. What shall we do? Let's go to the community and ask them. Go for it. Go for it. Okay, so now we have the option to choose a fee, and I'm going to go ahead and opt for a higher fee. Oh, she's impatient. She wants things quick. She wants to etch things on the chain real quick. I'm so cheap. Back in my Ethereum days, I would make sure to choose my gas fee, the lowest one possible, and then I panic for it again. totally and now and now we're going to here's here's what's special about bitcoin nfts the the ordinals is that you're going to need to use a special ordinals address so what i'm going to do here is go into my collectibles tab i'm going to select my ordinals address which which starts in bc1 and i'm going to paste it here and because i'm sending it to myself i can just put it in the recipient Bitcoin address part.

19:34And let's go ahead and I'll put my email in here.

19:41And here we go. Did you have to insert the ordinals wallet or was it there already? So all I had to do was just type the text and then click continue. Okay. And same thing if you're uploading image, You just upload the image and click continue. And now I'm going to need to send Bitcoin to this address. And so I have the option to either manually type in the Bitcoin amount and the address to my browser extension, or I can opt to simply scan the QR code to pay with Xverse. And Xverse has a really easy way to scan it. Because I'm on the browser extension, I'll go ahead and copy this address. and I'm going to be manually typing in the amount of Bitcoin I want to send.

20:32So I'll do that real quick here. This is the funniest thing about Bitcoin because it's worth so much money. Not point. Not, not, not, not, not, not, not, not.

20:44Hello? Hey, I'm still here. All good? Yeah, yeah, all good. I can hear you. Oh, okay. Great. Okay. Okay, so now I'm clicking continue. Check on the status of your transaction.

21:04And let's see, we can view the payment details here.

21:12And then we're just gonna wait for that transaction to go through. Sometimes it takes a little bit longer because this is Bitcoin that we're working with. It's not a super fast chain, but we are working on various scalable solutions. and then we should be able to see that ordinal, that Bitcoin NFT pop up. And so I will see a text soon in my Xverse gallery showing Real Vision Lumps Bitcoin. So we can look at that if we go into my gallery here. I can open up the gallery. I can view some of the NFTs that I have in this particular wallet address. So you can see I already have secured another Bitcoin username, Xverseapp.sats.

21:55I have Elizabeth Olsen.sats. I've got some tokens. I've got one of my own inscriptions, some Rachmaninoff sheep. You're showing us your bags, basically, Elizabeth. Roger on our platform goes live demos are great. And even though things obviously not as smooth sailing on a live demonstration, it actually is more than harder than it looks with the live bandwidth that we got going on as well. But to show the interface of the website is even a good start, I would say, to show how people really to do this journey safely. Okay, so we spoke about ordinals. I'm going to get to a question from you from my favorite Canadian friend trader about why stacks is important, but we'll get to those in the questions further down the line.

22:40And we also went through how to sort of inscribe a text or an image on ordinal via gamma so moving on um elizabeth because i get the chance to hang out with you and i know you're so all over ordinals i know you were a speaker at an ordinal conference that took place and there's even one plan for next year um what excites you most on the web 3 l2 developments in the eco bitcoin ecosystem as you're like everywhere across most of these projects? Yeah, I mean, I think that's something, I mean, you kind of named it right there. Like what we need to see on Bitcoin now is L2 scalability solutions. We need to make Bitcoin more usable.

23:22And one thing that we're working on at Xverse is we're working on Lightning integration to enable instant and fast, low cost, cost-effective instant payments. So that's something that I'm really excited about. We're working on a lot of really exciting security solutions as well. For example, multi-sig. So multi-signature means that multiple people will have access to that same account. And so you're spreading security across many different people. And in order to put a transaction through above a certain amount, you can set the amount of people will need to sign on that transaction. So it's another added layer of security.

23:59We're also working on hardware support. so we'll be the um drum roll a little a little alpha here but we'll probably be um the first wallet to uh have hardware support uh for ordinals for uh for uh for for the bitcoin nfts so that's that's really exciting as well as brc20 tokens uh and and i i just think i'm i'm so excited to see all the new talent and and devs i think ordinals have created this flywheel effect for bitcoin with bringing the right kind of people to the space, launching new projects, bringing in artists and collectors and developers. And that leads to funding. And that's just only going to help the ecosystem flourish more and more.

24:44Hey, everyone. We're going to take another quick break and hear a word from our partners. We'll be right back to the Real Vision Crypto Daily Briefing.