On March 1, a Bitcoin Ordinal depicting a poop emoji was purchased for 1.2 BTC — roughly $28,000 at the time of publication.
The ordinal bore the inscription Inscription #121 and was struck on block 773820.
It’s unclear whether the transaction was a legitimate or sham buying and selling attempt to increase curiosity in the average and total NFT ecosystem.
Buying and selling of NFT Wash
Wash buying and selling occurs when the client and vendor in a transaction are the same or are in cahoots — often to artificially increase the value of an asset by generating curiosity and instilling FOMO.
NFT markets have been rife with wash buying & selling since their inception due to a lack of regulation and the inherent anonymity of the business. For now, it’s difficult to tell whether or not a buyer and seller in a transaction are entirely different people.
Historically, NFT wash merchants have pretended to make gross sales by taking advantage of the digital nature of those markets and the lack of regulation. They sell the NFT at an exorbitant price and then purchase it with a different account. This gives the impression to the NFT that it is effective, which piques interest and may result in a sale to an unsuspecting buyer.
Because of the inherent anonymity of the crypto and NFT industries, it’s difficult to tell whether or not a transaction is trustworthy at first glance. Wash merchants can use as many wallets and accounts as they want to try to hide their actions, and buyers must be increasingly cautious when engaging in NFT trades.
In 2022, the analysis revealed that approximately 95% of all buying and selling volume on the NFT platform LooksRare was associated with clean buying and selling.
In the meantime, Dune Analytics’ analysis discovered that roughly 45% of all NFT buying & selling quantity on Ethereum was linked to shady trades.
Ordinals
Ordinals are extra bits of information linked to satoshis, or sats, which are Bitcoin’s lowest denomination or atomic unit. Every Bitcoin comprises 100,000,000 sats, just like every dollar is 100 cents.
In a nutshell, the Ordinal Protocol allows customers to embed extra knowledge in sats. The data will be in the form of audio, video, text, or a jpeg image. In the case of Inscription #121, the ordinal is a jpeg image of a poop emoji.
Casey Rodarmor created the Ordinal Protocol, which debuted on January 21. The crypto community is divided on whether ordinals are beneficial to the Bitcoin ecosystem or detrimental to its overall picture.
