Bitcoin is evolving into a multi-asset network

For more than a decade, the primary narratives surrounding Bitcoin (BTC) have focused on its role as a peer-to-peer digital cash and store of value.

However, all indications suggest that we are witnessing a significant shift in this paradigm.

Since the beginning of 2023, one of the most discussed topics in the Bitcoin ecosystem has been the use of the world’s leading blockchain to store information that goes beyond the previously mentioned use cases.

Related: Bitcoin fragments could become more valuable than full Bitcoins

If you have been isolated in an igloo during this crypto winter and are unaware of the developments, here is a brief overview.

In January 2023, developer Casey Rodamor introduced Ordinals to the world, a protocol that allows you to permanently inscribe any file into the Bitcoin blockchain.

This wasn’t the first method created for such an action, but it gained the most traction, creating a trend where nonfungible token (NFT) collections, music, video games, journalistic articles, and even WikiLeaks records began to be stored in an eternal and immutable manner on the world’s largest decentralized network.

‘Anonymous activist group is inscribing the Afghan war logs published by WikiLeaks into #Bitcoin to protest imprisonment of Julian Assange’ @BitcoinMagazine #FreeAssange https://t.co/1huZ6J9SDM

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 23, 2023

As a result, experiments, innovation, and the perspective of the Bitcoin network as a vast decentralized database began to simmer.

Despite being less than a year old, the Ordinals protocol has been evolving remarkably to become more efficient and to enable bolder use cases.

One of the noteworthy enhancements is the technique of recursive inscriptions, which allows users to circumvent the 4-megabyte storage limit per block, enabling the insertion of larger data on the Bitcoin blockchain.

As an example — illustrated by the image below — I inscribed an entire article from Cointelegraph on Bitcoin using a recursive inscription.

In total, eight inscriptions were made to achieve the final result, at a total file size of 5.22 kilobytes. (That’s small.) Seven of the inscriptions were images from the article, each stored individually in a Satoshi through the Ordinals protocol. The eighth inscription comprises a code that contains the article’s text and issues requests to retrieve the images from the…