For quite some time Bitcoin has been left out of the race as its competitors dominate the NFT and Web3 space. It seems like that is about to change as innovators in the Bitcoin universe are starting to explore more possibilities. In this episode of Edge of NFT, our special guest shares how Ordinals are making it possible to create NFTs through Bitcoin. Leonidas, the passionate ordinal collector and visionary behind Ord.io, a revolutionary platform that takes your Bitcoin exploration to a whole new level. The trailblazer of The Ordinal Show, Leonidas is also renowned for the Leonidas Collection, a treasure trove of historically significant NFTs from the era of 2011 to 2020. Leonidas shares how Ord.io presents a unique opportunity to search, browse and cast or vote on ordinal inscriptions in an unprecedented manner. Tune in and join him as he delves into the captivating world of Bitcoin and NFTs!
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Listen to the podcast here
Leonidas Of Ord.io — The Platform That Allows You To Explore Bitcoin Like Never Before
NFT-curious readers, stay tuned for this episode to learn all you wished you’d already known about ordinals, a new way to create NFTs through Bitcoin.
What classic collector’s item our guest first started getting into through the local farmer’s market.
Finally, explore the extraordinary world of primitive digital artifacts revealing a captivating narrative of innovation and culture. Before we move on, don’t forget our Outer Edge LA event returned to LA in March of 2023. You can now catch up on all the discussions, presentations and more by heading over to Watch.OuterEdge.live and register with just your email address. You’ll have access to over 60 captivating conversations and performances. Binge watchers are welcome. See you inside.
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Our episode features Leonidas King, the passionate ordinal collector and visionary behind Ord.io, a revolutionary platform that takes your Bitcoin exploration to a whole new level. The trailblazer of The Ordinal Show, Leonidas is also renowned for the Leonidas Collection, a treasure trove of historically significant NFTs from the era of 2011 to 2020. Much like prehistoric cave paintings.
These primitive digital artifacts permanently etched into blockchains will serve as timeless relics for future generations. These pieces narrate a tale of innovation, culture, and empowerment and honor the early pioneers whose groundbreaking creations became the bedrock for modern NFTs. Ord.io presents a unique opportunity to search, browse and cast or vote on ordinal inscriptions in an unprecedented manner. Tune in and join them as they delve into the captivating world of Bitcoin and NFTs. We’re talking to Leonidas. How are you doing?
Eathan, how’s it going? I’m doing great.
Awesome. Great to have you.
It’s great to have you on. My Twitter alerts are always going off with all the content that you’re doing about this whole ordinals movement. We thought what better than have the Lion King himself on the show to break it down for us?
I appreciate that. I’m pumped to be here.
We are too. We want to start at the beginning here. We have very informed readers that are very curious about ordinals and BRC-20 but for a lot of them, this is going to be very new. At the very beginning, how did this movement come about and what’s its essence, then we’ll go into details.
This all started with this guy, Casey Rodarmor. He’s a Bitcoin core developer who came up with this interesting way to take an SAT. A SAT, also known as a Satoshi, is the smallest denomination of a Bitcoin. You can split every Bitcoin into 100 million sats, so you end up with 2.1 quadrillion sats in potential total circulation.
He assigns a number to these through this unique first-in, first-out indexing method that he created and essentially allows you to track all of these sats like individually as they move around the Bitcoin network. This was an innovation. Probably in 2022, he was starting to formalize this. He ended up creating a protocol called Ordinals and came up with this second innovation. This guy is full of magic tricks where you can take any file. Upload it to the Bitcoin blockchain and store data on Bitcoin or any arbitrary data. When you combine these two things together, you end up with a fully on-chain NFT primitive. That’s what we call ordinals and ordinal inscriptions.
When you say it like that, it all is pretty straightforward. What do you think, Eathan?
I’ve been following along with this. We’re good friends with Trevor from The Ordinal Show as well. He’s been into this quite heavily and watching it from a distance. There’s a bit of a buzz around it like I’m alluding to. The essence seemingly brings in Bitcoin and more into this whole Web3 ethos, which Ethereum is sitting in and other tokens are but maybe Bitcoin is seen as outside of it. Tell us a little bit about this. Demystify how things are different at this moment here.
It’s a very weird melting pot of, we’ve got Solana people, Ethereum people, NFTD gens mixing with these Bitcoiners, who I would call reformed laser eye maxis. They might have been the laser eye cult of Bitcoin maxis, who essentially is a bit of a generalization but they believe that you use blockchains for currency. That’s the only valid use case for blockchains. Everything else is to some degree unethical. They don’t like the Web3 activity and all the innovation on Ethereum and these other chains.
My general question was about the development of the culture here of Web3 over Bitcoin whereas it has been in existence within these other chains. It’s a little bit more heavily represented by Ethereum or Solana or other things. You’re mentioning that the Bitcoin maxis were a segment of culture that maybe wasn’t as into the rest of the ecosystem or thought of Bitcoin as a currency layer or tradable store of value, yes?
Basically, that Web3 culture ended up moving to these other chains. It started on Bitcoin back in 2014 with a protocol called Counterparty. There were some interesting experiments there but Vitalik basically came along and said, “I want to do this stuff but the people on Bitcoin aren’t very friendly to experimentation and innovation.”
They ended up doing this blockchain called Ethereum and you get this explosion in, smart contracting and general-purpose blockchains. That’s been largely the exciting trend in this space for years. Bitcoin, in my opinion, got left behind from a technological perspective and experience a period of stagnation. Only with Casey’s ordinance protocol have we started to break down that cultural wall on Bitcoin of, “It’s only acceptable to do the currency use case.”
Now that we can do NFTs, we can do fungible tokens. People are doing meme coins and metaverse projects. Everything you can do on Ethereum, there’s some way you can probably hack it together on Bitcoin. It’s not always going to be the best use case. Ethereum is good because you do have these smart contracts. It’s going to be a lot better at certain things. Specifically for storing value, like, “I want to take this image and put it immutably fully on-chain with this fully on-chain protocol. I want to hold that. I want it to store value for the next hundred years.”
In my opinion, Bitcoin does that better than any other chain. For the reason, people value Bitcoin, the currency, for the security, immutability, and decentralization of the chain. People also value their art being stored here. What we’re seeing is this higher-end of the market coming over to Bitcoin. You’re not going to be doing these giant Solana-style projects with millions of people doing lots of transactions. You are going to see that higher-end of the market, which is a larger percentage of the market gravitate towards here. The thesis is the highest-value assets will want to be stored fully on-chain on Bitcoin because that’s the most secure way to store that value over time.
An analogy here might be folks have referred to Bitcoin as digital gold. In this case, what we’re talking about is engraving artifacts and digital gold where once that it’s engraved, it’s going to be there for a long time.
Since this data is immutable, you take that image and store it fully on-chain. It’s very simple. There’s nothing to do with it. You hold the asset. It turns out that that’s very ideal for certain collectors and assets. For example, on Ethereum, you have a lot of smart contracts that hold very valuable assets. There’s this expectation by the collectors of those assets that it’s going to be the same. We’ve seen some projects.
I won’t name the project but take that metadata and change it. They end up going to their gallery and seeing a middle finger is now the artwork. That’s because the metadata isn’t frozen, so it’s not a fully immutable primitive. Basically, taking the data and storing it on-chain then not being able to change that data seems like it might be a limitation but it turns out that’s a benefit for storing value and for certain assets. Your IPFS link won’t get unpinned in two years because you stopped paying the bills.
It’s stored fully on-chain. Your metadata is not going to get changed because there would be no way to change the metadata. It might be beneficial for certain projects to have that general-purpose smart contracting on Ethereum for specifically high-end NFT assets. For the Grail assets, you would imagine you want them to be the same. The Monalisa gets painted and we don’t want anything happening to it. That is what Bitcoin is good at storing.
I wanted to cover a few other technical areas of innovation that we were chatting about in the green room before to make sure that we dot our Is and cross our Ts. Speaking of innovation like rare sats and recursion, can you talk to us a little bit about these things as well?
Rare sats are basically taking these 2.1 quadrillion sats that we now can individually track and certain ones are being found more valuable than others by the market. I’ll give one example. Satoshi Nakamoto mined the sat and it was one of the sets of sats that he sent to somebody as a gift. It then got sent throughout the network over time and these sat hunters go and they sift through.
I know people who’ve sifted through billions of dollars of Bitcoin in their wallet extracting these rare sats. There’s a market for these because you can then inscribe on them. That’s an interesting thing for a collector. Now you can have an NFT and you have your image but it’s on a sat that was held in Satoshi’s wallet, which is this extra cool level of an NFT that you can’t do on another chain because of the way Bitcoin works.
That is the lowdown on rare sats we could dive into. There are absurd ideas I’ve heard like hitman sats from Ross Ulbricht’s arrest and all kinds of crazy sats that have been part of interesting moments in Bitcoin’s history. Pizza sats were part of the 10,000 Bitcoin transaction that bought two pizzas back in May 2010. The creator of ordinals, Casey Rodarmor, created this rarity index built into the ordinals protocol saying that the first sat in a block is uncommon specifying a bunch of these rare sats.
There are about 700,000 on commons. We saw that OKX started extracting theirs from their wallets, it looks like. Don’t quote me on that. This is what’s the buzz. We’re seeing miners also starting to pluck those out when they mine a block. They can get a little extra in addition to their reward. By taking those and selling those, they’re worth roughly $500 now. That’s rare sats.
Quick question about the sats in general. Can you trade a sat without it being in your wallet? Does it make sense? I might have sats in my wallet that somehow are attached to some previous transaction a long time ago. Is it that you’re trading something that’s almost like a collector’s card of that actual sat or do you have to have it in your wallet to have that SAT? I’m assuming it’s more like the collecting cards type of style thing or a little bit of both.
You could think about this and frame it in different ways. Casey calls this a collective delusion of like, “We now believe that these first in, first out indexing is how we’re going to trace these sats.” The way to think about it is say you have half a Bitcoin in your wallet. That’s 50 million sats. That’s probably going to be sats from 2009 and 2014 in hundreds of different places because it got sent all around the network. You got this mixed group of 50 million sats.
For each one of those sats, you could individually select it in your wallet and transfer that specific sat to another address. You are in that way like trading a specific sat. Again, this is all made-up indexing model that is not officially part of the Bitcoin protocol but because so many people believe in it, it becomes a thing, if that makes sense.
It makes sense. It creates numismatics around Bitcoin where there wasn’t one before. It’s up to the collectors what they find interesting or not. None of these has inherent value. It’s all human culture around, “This nickel was half made with copper or whatever it was so I’d love to have it.” Rarity is a common theme when it comes to numismatic and collectibles and things like that.
I also think as Bitcoin and being a very scarce asset becomes more scarce, this is foreshadowing a way of looking at the value of Bitcoin in a more granular fashion.
This is the analogy I’m using that I like that makes sense. Bitcoin is digital gold. The rare sats are digital diamonds. People are finding these little diamonds that are much more scarce than the 2.1 quadrillion sats. There’ll be some very small percentage of all Bitcoin that they can specify and have this narrative around, then trade those as if they’re non-fungible.
Bitcoin is digital gold. The rare SATs are digital diamonds. Click To Tweet
Did we cover recursion yet?
No. Recursion is this upgrade that we had to the ordinals protocol where, before this upgrade, you would inscribe a file. It sits on the full nodes all around the world. It is just a file and it doesn’t know anything about other files. In the new upgrade, you can use a certain standard of specifying in your inscription with code.
You can say, “I’m going to inscribe a bunch of HTML code and I want to pull this image from this other inscription that is stored on Bitcoin into my new inscription then place it on an HTML canvas,” for example. The way this works is, imagine you have a 10,000 profile pitcher collection. This would be extremely expensive to mint. On fully on-chain Bitcoin, storing those 10,000 JPEGs fully on-chain is not the cheapest thing.
People spent over $1 million inscribing the Bitcoin Apes, for example. With recursion, you could do that for 100 times less money. Let’s say you take 50 or 100 or however many traits there are in your collection. You take those, inscribe those transparent PNG files, then create 10,000 inscriptions of HTML or SVG code that says, “I want the data for inscription,” then you would do the ID for that inscription of this trait and, “I want this trait.” Bring those three traits and place them here, you end up with the on-chain art still. It’s the exact same image. If you’ll put it at the end of the day, you just stored it in a much more efficient manner. It’s essentially an efficiency upgrade that unlocks generative art basically.
It’s like Bitly. Instead of the full handle for the website, you have an abbreviation that still leads you to the end product.
That’s a great point. There’s a standard like Bitly to basically reference something else.
You’re totally allowed to use that analogy moving forward on the show without any attribution at all.
This is a new thing. People don’t necessarily know what to make of it. Full disclosure, could this come and go? We don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on here but maybe there are some people who are interested because they want to learn more and get into it. We’re talking about folks like digital art collectors, fine art collectors, or someone who wants to know if it’s going to affect them in some way. What is a great way for people to know more about it? Where would you have sent them?
I would tend to say go to Ordinals.com. This is the official explorer created by Casey. He has a handbook that he created there. I’d spend 30 minutes reading through that. That’s going to get you up to speed pretty fast. As far as getting fully onboarded from a practical perspective, you want to download what’s effectively the equivalent of the MetaMask for Bitcoin. Xverse and Hiro are two Chrome extensions that you can download to your extension.
It’s an identical experience using MetaMask. You can send Bitcoin into that from some other wallet address you have or from Coinbase or wherever. Now you have a wallet that you can start doing things with. Ethereum has dApps. Now Bitcoin has dApps. You would go to a website, connect your wallet, and then you could say, “I want to go to Magic Eden’s Ordinals Marketplace.”
You’d connect your Bitcoin wallet then you would buy your first Inscription. You could go to OrdinalsBot.com. You could take a file and drag and drop it. You could send that into the Bitcoin network and you’d pay the fee that it costs to inscribe. All of the things you’d want to do, there are websites and tools now where you can go connect your wallet and start interacting in this space. If you’re used to using MetaMask and OpenSea and all this stuff on Ethereum, this will feel pretty familiar to you. It wasn’t like this for the first month or so, but the tooling has gotten a lot better.
Quick follow-up there. I’m guessing people who are into NFTs, blockchain, crypto trading, and things like that are interested in this. They’re making a transition from, “I was trading this. Now I’m going to go over and get into this.” Are you seeing anybody going directly into this like, “I wasn’t into NFTs but I want to check out ordinals?” Is that a thing that you’re seeing? If so, what person would that be?
There are all kinds of weird situations like this. If you’re aware, Peter Schiff is this very outspoken critic of Bitcoin saying it holds zero value. He flooded crypto, Bitcoin, and NFTs for a very long time, then came out pro-ordinals. He thinks it’s pretty cool that you can store data fully on-chain from an art perspective on Bitcoin. He might not be super thrilled about some of the things that are going on but that’s an example of someone that I would personally would’ve never imagined we’d be orange peeling tether through ordinals.
There are people like that who, for whatever reason, the Bitcoin currency use case wasn’t interesting to them but they’re very interested in this stuff. Michael Saylor is an example as well of someone who wasn’t interested in Web3 on other chains but is a Bitcoiner who holds a very large percentage of the Bitcoin supply. He is now interested in Web3 because it’s happening on Bitcoin.
It attracts different people. There’s a crowd of Bitcoiners who find this interesting. They probably would’ve found Web3 interesting but because of their bags, they couldn’t justify going and using other chains, which to me is a little silly. Everyone should tip their toes into everything and experiment. There’s this group of people that you would not expect to be doing Web3 stuff but because it’s on Bitcoin, it’s now a little more socially acceptable for them to do that.
This Peter-ship thing is for real. It’s not a spoof. This is him doing this.
My cofounder met up with him at an Ordinal event in New York City and got him to put on an ordinals Ord.io hat and we inscribed that image. The guy is clearly interested in the art side of things, which I think is pretty fun. We were very welcoming people like Solana people, Ethereum people, and Paxos people. Bitcoin used to be a little bit adversarial to these groups. We’re very excited for these people to come here and for them to share what they learned in their Web3 experiences on other chains so that Bitcoin can grow and improve. We have to open our minds a little bit.
Another analogy came to mind for me, and this is like an air weave for Bitcoin. Permanent storage is something that did shift the conversation around Web3 because it offered an alternative solution for permanency which now is available in this community. We’re all about co-creation, having open dialogue, and being unique to hear all perspectives. You’re having some cool conversations on The Ordinal Show with different individuals. Can you give us a glimpse into any of the interesting combos of late and the type of stuff you guys like to talk about?
We start out very organized then it derails after the first maybe hour and a half. I love having Udi on. Udi is this interesting character who was a hardcore Bitcoin Maxi. He’s very much the laser eye sort that would be very annoying if you were a Web3 person who saw the light, came over to Ethereum, was playing around with Web3 stuff, and realized from a dev perspective, there’s interesting stuff going on here.
Now he is this outspoken advocate and holds the line between the culture war happening on Bitcoin of the Bitcoin Maxis and the Ordinals people who are both fighting for what they believe the future of Bitcoin should be here. He’s an interesting character. He is behind the Taproot Wizards project. They came in pretty strong early on. They have Inscription number 652 and it was the largest block ever mined on Bitcoin. They stored a full 4-megabyte file on Bitcoin and that’s the first NFT in their collection.
I have seen those guys around. In fact, our hosts for Outer Edge LA did a wizard shower on stage and I didn’t even know about it until after the fact. I was irritated because I would’ve been happy to also make sure that Eathan, Jeff, and I got a wizard shower live as well but alas, that didn’t happen. I’m sure we’ll have Udi on the show at some point sooner or later.
I remember we were doing an Ordinal Show while that was happening. Medved must have been there as well because he was giving us the live reports on Outer Edge.
I was in a Twitter space with Trevor and saying, “We could do a wizard shower over here. If we go and pull it together, we’ll pull it off.” At that time, it probably already happened. Maybe it was about to happen or something. Tell us about Ord.io. This is your baby here. It’s doing things to revolutionize how people can interact with ordinal inscriptions. Could you give us a peek behind the curtain?
My co-founder, Zach, and I had this idea to take this explore experience, which at that time was this feed of every block that gets mined. You get a bunch of new inscriptions created in all these files and you could view them on Ordinals.com. We were like, “You can see this in the newest order.” We want to see the coolest inscriptions at any given time. We’re trying to think of ways to create a signal through all of that noise. What we ended up doing was creating Ord.io, which is an explorer for ordinal inscriptions.
What you can basically do is use a bunch of these complex sorting and filtering mechanisms to find interesting things. You could sort by file type. You could sort by the oldest sat that’s inscribed on all of these things that the nerdy collectors care about. You can upvote the inscription.
You connect with a wallet then you sign a message verifying your ownership of at least one ordinal inscription in your address. That is so we know that if you’re voting, you hold at least one ordinal inscription. We’re using pip3 to do that then you can start voting on the site. What we see is people find interesting things and they’ll upload those. Those will start trending on the homepage. In that way, it’s like a Reddit or hacker news style experience where the top inscriptions that people are inscribing get put to the top.
People go to Ord.io not only you can check out what’s new that’s popping up and vote on that but you can also see what’s the hottest thing that’s happening in ordinals now. All of the popular projects that are minting and stuff now, you’ll start to see those start trending and you can keep an eye out for things. I would say something that we didn’t quite expect that’s interesting is because this is a fully on-chain primitive, pretty much all of the “alpha” like everything you would want to know is fully on-chain.
You can go look and explore these different assets and find something interesting being inscribed and know about that before people tweet about it two days later. All that information is live on the blockchain as it happens, which is an interesting dynamic. That doesn’t exist on other chains and it’s because of how this protocol works.
It’s cool. I’m on there now. I see a mix of aliens and high-definition art with some computer programming language with a lot of PEPEs. He’s still trending. How do you make these tags work? like I see gifts versus texts, videos, games, audio, and 3D. Do you have some AI tools working or a whole team that’s tagging all these images?
We are using the file type specifically for the tabs. You could go to images or GIFs as you said. The images, for example, are going to be PNGs, WEBPs, and JPEGs. We group those together as a simple filtering mechanism. What’s more interesting to me is if you go further along the line, the more weird experiments people are trying. There’s a game section. People are uploading games fully on-chain on Bitcoin that you can play on our site.
People are inscribing these 3D files that if you have an iPhone, you can go to this 3D tab. Click on any inscription under that tab and click the AR button then walk outside, throw it into your front yard or something. It’s fun. People are trying lots of interesting experiments and we want to support that. We are doing some AI tagging so every inscription goes through an AI moderation filter.
I’m going to be honest that it’s not that great that the AI will tag an asset based on if it sees somebody wearing a hat, it’ll put a hat tag on it or sunglasses on it. If you search in our search bar for a hat, you could see all the inscriptions that have a hat. It’s not perfect but people are using it in fun ways. We’re going to look to improve that feature over time.
This is such a nascent space and at this early stage, it’s probably a little bit difficult to look at the roadmap for ordinals and Ord.io and whatnot but let’s try it anyways. As you look ahead, what are the types of collaborations, innovations, and partnerships that you see forthcoming in this space?
The large centralized exchanges have shown interest in the BRC-20 protocol, which is the fungible token protocol built on top of ordinals. 9 of the top 10 crypto exchanges have tweeted about it. OKX is actively working on its ability to trade BRC-20 tokens. There are a few tokens tradable now. Don’t quote me on that. Shout-out to Binance. CZ has shown interest.
Somebody shared this video with me where somebody asked him at this conference in Hong Kong, “What are you most excited for in crypto?” He said, “NFTs in Bitcoin.” It was his answer. We were like, “That’s interesting.” I inscribed the video of him saying that for fun. The centralized exchanges are a very powerful force in this space. If they want to build integrations, integrate it with their marketplace for NFTs like Binance has done with inscriptions now being able to be traded there. The more integrations, the better.
I’m very excited about let’s build some infrastructure around rare sats and how can we trade rare sats, and extract rare sats. That market is interesting. We’ve got pretty good infrastructure. Magic Eden is the number one marketplace by volume for trading inscriptions now and that seems to be all going pretty smoothly. That’s a good experience. I’d like to see more builders interested in building around their sats. That’s personally what we’re excited to build towards now. Go to Twitter, see what people are complaining about, and try to build some solution for them. It would be a great start if I was a builder joining the space.
We’re going to wrap up soon here. We will go over to Quick Hitters. That should be pretty fun. Before we do, a great question to always explore is, what else are you paying attention to? You’re deep into the ordinals now, things in ordinals that we may not have mentioned and you might not be involved with, as well as other things in Web3 that maybe the readers might find interesting.
Maybe even a collection coming out that you’re excited about.
There are lots of these little Metas in ordinals. We covered rare sats and recursion is popular now. I’m excited for people to keep exploring this protocol and keep experimenting with what they can do. I would like to see some generative art get created. Since we now have recursion, you can create a provably random number on-chain on Bitcoin that does a reveal in the future then make art with the same packages that our box does and do that in a very efficient, cost-effective manner.
To be honest, OnChainMonkey is the main example I can think of. This stuff is very brand new. This upgrade was new so OnChainMonkey is the main name in this now. I don’t hold one of their pieces but I wish I did. My guess is we’re going to start to see some more serious generative art being created here. I would keep an eye out for specifically the art block style artists coming here and creating stuff because that is now unlocked by the protocol.
I’ll double down on recursion there. I’ll give another shout-out to Udi. They have a pretty cool project. They’ve fully inscribed the Taproot Wizards project and that’ll be a big when it comes out. If I was in this space, I would personally be doing their Wizards School. That is, in my opinion, the easiest way to get a whilst for an asset that will probably be worth a decent little prize there.
I would say check out their Wizard School. That’s two things that are on the horizon that are pretty exciting. There are all kinds of cool people trying stuff with rare sats now as well. I’ll give a shout-out to Jameson. They’re doing some interesting stuff and Elena is doing some interesting stuff with rare sats. Get plugged into the space. Come listen to The Ordinal Show. You’ll hear about some of the more interesting things going on. Shout-out Ord.io. You can always go see what’s trending. That might be a cool hint. There’s been an explosion of people coming to the space and trying cool stuff. There’s a lot of interesting stuff to look at. I honestly can’t quite keep up with myself now.
We’re hosting a show about the thing. Sometimes, it’s even harder to keep track of everything because you put so much time into making the show.
People think we know about everything happening in this space.
We don’t have time to buy the NFTs that are valuable. That’s been the bane of our existence.
We got a few here and there.
Let’s move on to Edge Quick Hitters. Quick Hitters is a fun, quick way to get to know you a bit better. There are ten questions. We’re looking for a short, single, or a few-word response but feel free to expand if you get the urge. Are you ready?
I’m ready.
What is the first thing you remember ever purchasing in your life?
I’m not sure if it’s the first thing I purchased but I remember going to collect coins at the farmers’ market. This guy had a stand with all these old coins when I was a little kid. I’d go with my dad and sift through all these old coins. I’d look at the dates and try to find the oldest one. I remember that being a pretty fun experience. As you mentioned, I have some nickels in my collection and hay pennies. Some interesting stuff there.
Shout-out to farmers’ markets. I always love the farmers’ market. I was chatting with a friend at my son’s preschool. I was talking to another parent and I found out they had a little farmers’ market stand and they make their own little pastry things. I got to go check that out. Next question, what is the first thing you ever remember selling in your life?
I mowed lawns in high school. I would like to go around and you could say selling a service of my sweat. Maybe that would be something I can remember actively selling.
That’s a common early enterprise. What is the most recent thing you’ve purchased?
I got a microphone and stand so that I would sound better on podcasts.
It’s sounding very good, I might say. Some good research there. What is the most recent thing you sold?
The last thing I sold would be a few Bitcoin Punks. I was very early to get some Bitcoin Punks so I was going to take a little bit off the table. I sold 5% of that. I collected a lot of NFTs during the bull run of 2021 and have held most of those NFTs. I’ve minted a lot of them pretty much all the way down here. It would be demoralizing to sell some of them now so I’m trying to hold this through and wait until the next exciting bull run.
What do they call that? The gambler’s fallacy.
Whatever I said there is probably the opposite of what any investment book says but we’re going to ride.
It’s a little bit different. It’s a common collectors type of thing mindset. I don’t know if it’s the sunk cost policy but it’s like, “I like this. I’m going to keep it and then I get rid of it.” Next question, what is your most prized possession?
I wouldn’t call it a possession. It’s my family and my dogs. I’m very much minimalist in real life. I drive an old car. I don’t own that many things in real life. Maybe that’s my real-life answer. In the Metaverse, I love my Satoshi card. I have four of them and they’re this very early dank art on Bitcoin on Counterparty from 2015. It’s part of my PFP here. It’s the outer hoodie part. That is art from Counterparty like I was saying and it’s the first crypto art depicting Satoshi ever. I find it very cool.
We did find out from a lawyer, although this is not legal advice, that your children are your possessions until they’re eighteen.
That is true.
You said something like that when answering this very question. Next question. Number six, if you could buy anything in the world, digital, physical, service, or experience that is currently for sale, what would it be?
Probably bribe an Apple employee. I’d like to check out the Apple Vision Pro.
We don’t know if that’s currently for sale but there’s a lot of Apple employees maybe.
I would go for the bribe. It would be worth it.
They keep a tight shift but you never know.
They’ve left them in bars before. It would be a pretty fun party trip to whip out the Apple Vision Pro.
Someone is probably going to do it at some point. If you could pass on one of your personality traits to the next generation, what would it be?
I’m pretty curious. I try to be open-minded and experiment with different things. This is what Bitcoin got wrong for the last few years. It got it right for its first couple of years. That experimentation and excitement around trying new things left Bitcoin and went over to Ethereum. It very much want to make sure that gets brought back to Bitcoin. That recipe for innovation of trying a thousand crazy ideas and hoping that a few of them works. It’s how we innovate and move this space forward and get mass adoption. I would say stay curious and experiment.
I appreciate that and specifically on that point. I remember some of those early Bitcoin conferences. It was like there was this era of possibility and excitement but then you went later and it was like, “What next?” It’s like, “I hold Bitcoin.” “I hold it too. What are we going to talk about here? Is that enough to produce some cultural glue?” At the end of the day, when I hear everything you’ve shared about ordinals, for me, it’s very reminiscent of the cultural spark in the Web3 movement. These NFTs go up, they go down and some work, some don’t but it creates a new energy. A new potential for an innovative Blair in the conversation that wasn’t there before.
I completely agree with that.
A good innovation-focused guy like yourself is on the mic. If you could eliminate one of your personality traits from the next generation, what would it be?
I’m a bit stubborn. This is very contrasting to me saying I’m open-minded but around certain things, I can tell I hung on way too long to whatever that was and totally ended up screwing myself over. This is in real life and crypto. I would tend to say to be more like the curious, open-minded side of me and less like the stubborn side of me. You have to know what you value and care about but also understand that this world that we’re in is moving extremely rapidly. It’s very hard to know what it’s going to look like in 5 or 10 years. Be adaptable and don’t be too stubborn in your ways.
Be adaptable and don't be too stubborn in your ways. Click To Tweet
Question number nine, what did you do before joining us on the show?
Twitter space, so lots of audio.
Are you able to use your cool new mic on Twitter spaces? Have you figured out that connection or still on the works?
I am told that it’s possible but as I said, this is someone who should have bought a mic years ago and didn’t. You’re not talking to the audio file expert here.
Question number ten, the final question, what are you going to do after the show?
My Twitter account was hacked so I am going to go write a thread because I need to let people know what happened. Hopefully, they cannot repeat the same mistakes that I did.
It looks like we have a bonus question here. Josh, do you want to pull that one off?
By the way, Mr. Calm, cool, and collected, thanks for joining the show in spite of the hack, and wishing you the best. I will tell you it could be worse. It could have been Giho at the first Outer Edge LA who got hacked for over $650 million before he was going to come on our show.
That is not fun.
He showed up too, though.
I respect it. Fortunately, this was not too bad. I haven’t, at least yet, dreading to hear of somebody getting their wallet drained from this. I’m hoping it didn’t happen, but we’ll see.
Wishing you the best there. The bonus question and everyone like to ask different predictions around Bitcoin. I don’t want to make it too specific but I am curious if you think Bitcoin will hit 50,000 again, what year and what quarter do you foresee that potentially happening?
There are two ways Bitcoin can hit 50,000. Bitcoin increases in its relative value or the US dollar decreases in relative value. People like Balaji think that the US dollar is going to go down in value. I would tend to say I’m on the front of the US dollar and will probably end up being fine but Bitcoin will continue to be thought of as a strong story of value at least as the gold narrative. If we can scale with layer 2s, probably as a currency. To me, it doesn’t matter if it’s in 1 year or 5 years as long as Bitcoin eventually 50 years from now is the world reserve currency or another blockchain that has similar ethoses. That’s all that I care about.
Give us a month.
That was the most elegant and graceful question dodge in the history of Edge of NFT.
This is an anonymous interview. You could say anything you want. It goes with your PFP reputation but tell us a month and year.
Let me contact my guy.
We’ll let you go on that one. The next segment is a fun one. It’s our new recurring segment where we own and manage our own Web3 digital basketball team brought to us by Swoops. Swoops is a blockchain-powered basketball simulation game that allows users to own and operate a 100% unique team, enter real money contests with their squads, and win daily cash prizes. We want to revisit the topic of Swoops GM here.
This is a daily NBA strategy game where users assemble a squad within a given salary cap to take on a challenging team made up of real or imagined NBA lineups. I’ll do a little screen share on this to give you guys an idea of what’s going on there. This is the overview of what the board looks like. You got to go to GM.PlaySwoops.com.
There are three simple setups. You got the challenge team that’s unveiled each morning at 12:00 AM PST. You build your team within a given salary cap then there are results released every day at Swoops o’clock, which is 5:30 PM PST. Mark your calendars any day for Swoops o’clock. Why not? This is a great place for you to practice if you’re not involved in Swoops yet.
You can practice playing and see how the game works and develop your strategy and your thoughts on the process before you dive in to check out the actual Swoops game. Make sure, folks, go out and check that out. Make sure you get on it because it’s the blast. Also, some interesting stuff going on is there is an All-Star Captain Challenge. This is Captain Challenge number two. The most points, rebounds, and assists in a single game for an individual Swoopster, top two Swoopster performances earned all-star captaincy.
The games will be completed in the five Swoopster lobbies to qualify. This begins at noon Eastern time, Tuesday at 6:20, and runs for 24 hours. Make sure you check that out. That should be pretty fun. A lot to stand to be gained there. It’s going to be fun to participate in that. How’s your team been doing that over there, Josh?
You’ve been providing all the updates. I’ve been playing because we need to win more games, Eathan. That’s the bottom line. We’re at 6 and 12 as I speak. However, we’ve started to mess around with our lineup a little bit. We have some one-star players that are pretty much on the bench at this point and on the trading block but maybe they add life to another team. Who knows? It’s clear to me that our center is holding us back. No offense to Swoopster 982 but he’s on the chopping block. Hopefully, with a small roster change, we can improve our record exponentially. It all comes down to chemistry at the end of the day. One player can make all the difference.
I’m checking this out too here. There’s a GM leaderboard too that people should check out. You can see various folks who are playing this GM Monthly Challenge and how well they’re doing with their wins and losses. Get up there and get yourself into the game and make sure you win because you’re a winner. If you’re a winner, go in there and start winning. That’s what I say. Now we’re going to be putting up a survey on Twitter where we’re naming a new player.
It’s time to name one of our additional stars. We’ve got this versatile guard-forward Swoopster 2794. He’s losing his sense of identity and we need to give him a name.
That helps. Sean, our producer and social media guru, is coming up with That’s Poll to put out on Twitter as we speak. We look forward to your guys’ info. I’ll share that. It looks like it’s live. It’s hot off the presses, hot on our Twitter here. Play Swoops fans, we’re now naming this Swoopster 2794 for small forward. Some essential stats to unlock but is already playing some great games. Here are our options. We’ve got Scotty Hive, Larry Bird Blockchain, and Avalanche Anthony. I love it.
Without biasing our audience here, I will say that one of those particular names reminds me of my favorite team and a city I love, which is Boston.
Fair enough. I see we have a vote already coming in for Scotty Hive, so lots of cool stuff going on there. Let’s see if we can catch up with where our Outer Edge travelers are in the ranking. We’re number 189 out of 244. We got some work to do to climb these rankings here and maybe make it to the Swoopster Bowl coming up soon.
Anyways, we’re doing our best. We’re working on our roster. We’re going to get there. We’ve got faith. You folks want to go play Swoops, come play against us. Come beat us. We’re relatively easy to beat at the moment. Also, if you’re not involved yet, go to GM.PlaySwoops.com. Anywhere you got to enter that coupon code or referral code, make sure you do Edge of NFT. Make sure that we’re keeping a tight relationship here with our special collaborators over there at Swoops. Thanks a lot.
Now it’s time for our shout-out. We give a moment to let you shout-out someone or something that is worth shouting out. It’s about as simple as that. What you got for us, Leonidas?
I’ll give a shout-out to this guy named Trevor Owens. We mentioned him a little bit here earlier. I hosted a show on NFT Now like a Twitter space and he hosted the show after me. For a long time, I knew him as the annoying person who always made us cut off our Twitter space so that they could go but I got to meet him in a space when we were celebrating hitting 10,000 ordinal inscriptions back in February 2023.
He’s a cool guy. He runs a fund that’s been investing in a bunch of these ordinal startups. He’s trying to help move the space forward. I co-host The Ordinal Show with him. I have gotten to know him and respect that he was here doing this but when it wasn’t popular, doing Web3 on Bitcoin with Stacks is what was his area for a period of time for several years.
I have a massive amount of respect for sticking around. As soon as I saw the cool stuff was happening on Ethereum and you’re going be in fights with Bitcoin Maxis all the time if you stayed on Bitcoin trying to do this stuff. I got out of here years ago and he decided to not care what other people said and pursue what he thought Bitcoin could be. I respect that.
That sounds about right. Cool. Anybody else you want to shout-out?
I’ll shout out my friends Adam and Jake from my historical NFT collecting days. I’ve moved fully into this ordinal stuff. It consumes you but still hold on to my historical NFTs and had a ton of fun. I’m collecting them with those guys over the 2021 and 2022 timeframe. They are working on this startup called Emblem Vault that allows you to take assets from Bitcoin and trade them on Ethereum. It’s a cross-chain bridging technology and it’s pretty cool.
You can take the old rare PEPEs or ordinal inscriptions from Bitcoin and trade them on OpenSea. For those people who maybe don’t want to deal with downloading Xverse and getting onboarded the slightly harder way to this space, they can dip their toes in and still own these assets by using the Emblem Vault curated collections on OpenSea.
Great stuff. Thanks for that. Now it’s time to close out here. Tell us first, where can readers go to learn more about you and the project you’re working on?
My Twitter account is @LeonidasNFT. Our company account for Ord.io is @Ord_io. I hang out mostly on Twitter, so you can DM me. My DMs are open. That’s where to find me.
We’ve reached the outer limit at the Edge of NFTs for now. Thanks for exploring with us. We’ve got space for more adventurers on this starship so invite your friends and recruit some cool strangers that will make this journey all so much better. How? Go to Spotify or iTunes now, rate us and say something awesome then go to EdgeOfNFT.com to dive further down the rabbit hole. Look us up on all major social platforms by typing EdgeOfNFT and start a fun conversation with us online. Lastly, be sure to tune in next time for more great Web3 content. Thanks again for sharing this time with us.
Important Links
- Watch.OuterEdge.live
- Ord.io
- The Ordinal Show - Twitter
- Casey Rodarmor - LinkedIn
- OKX
- Ordinals.com
- OrdinalsBot.com
- Peter Schiff
- Taproot Wizards
- Bitly
- Binance
- OnChainMonkey
- Wizards School
- Swoops
- GM.PlaySwoops.com
- Emblem Vault
- @LeonidasNFT – Twitter
- @Ord_io – Twitter
- Spotify – Edge of NFT
- iTunes – Edge of NFT
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