"Over the past year, innovation and development around Bitcoin has seen a renaissance of activity," writes Franklin Templeton Digital Assets. "The positive momentum in innovation is primarily due to Bitcoin NFTs, known as Ordinals, new fungible token starts such as BRC-20 and Runes, Bitcoin Layer 2s, and other Bitcoin DeFi primitives."
The firm summed up the acceleration of activity around Bitcoin NFTs after Casey Rodarmor launched the Ordinal protocol last year. In 2022, Rodarmor developed the concept of "ordinal theory", which assigns a specific number to each Satoshi, the smallest denomination of a Bitcoin, on the network.
"Our digital asset research team regularly reviews the entire digital asset ecosystem," a Franklin Templeton spokesperson told Decrypt. "This report in particular was inspired by the recent rise in trading volume and market capitalisation of Ordinals relative to NFTs on other networks."
Franklin Templeton Digital Assets outlined the rise of Ordinal collections in the NFT market in terms of trading volume and market capitalisation, highlighting NodeMonkes, Runestone, Bitcoin Puppets, Ordinal Maxi Biz, and Bitmap - terms that had probably never appeared in one of their prospectuses before.
"Bitcoin Ordinals have seen a surge in trading volume in recent months," said Franklin Templeton Digital Assets. "This is reflected in an increase in dominance from December 2023, when it overtook ETH in trading volume."
The digital assets team at Franklin Templeton has been a vocal advocate of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology on social media, and was described as going "full degen" in January after the US SEC approved the first round of Bitcoin ETFs, including the Franklin Bitcoin ETF (EZBC).
The reaction to Franklin Templeton Digital Assets' upbeat tweet was met with enthusiasm by the Ordinals community.
"Ordinals, Ordinals and more Ordinals," tweeted one account in response.
NFT archaeologist Adam McBride responded with the "Ladies and Gentlemen, we got him" meme taken from the US capture of Saddam Hussein.
Last week, Magic Eden co-founder and COO Z Yin said that the upcoming Runes protocol - a new fungible token standard launched by Casey Rodarmor at the Bitcoin halving later this month - "will boost the Bitcoin ecosystem".
"We believe Runes will further energise the Bitcoin ecosystem, paving the way for a new wave of builders and asset types previously only possible on other layer-1 chains," Yin told Decrypt. "It's a no-brainer for us to strengthen this ecosystem by adding Runes to our existing Ordinals marketplace, which has already reached $1 billion in volume in 2024."
