Bitwise, an asset management firm, made the Bitcoin address of its spot BTC exchange-traded fund (ETF) public on Jan. 24, becoming the first among the 10 spot BTC ETF issuers to do so. Within hours of being made public, the Bitcoin wallet address received numerous tips and donations, including some Bitcoin ordinals and rare sats.
Currently, the wallet address holds donations worth $6,083 and has over 16,000 inscriptions. These inscriptions include two RSIC airdrops, one Bitcoin Punk, one Bitcoin Burials, one Quadkey, and several others. Additionally, the account holds thousands of BRC-20 inscriptions, although there are no valid/active BRC-20 balances in the account.
Ordinals are Bitcoin-based nonfungible tokens (NFTs) that inscribe data, such as images and videos, to individual satoshis on the base Bitcoin blockchain. A satoshi is the smallest unit of Bitcoin, with 100,000,000 satoshis in a single Bitcoin. Although ordinals only emerged last year, they have surprised the crypto community with their popularity.
The popularity of ordinals and inscriptions has created two opposing views. On one hand, the pro-Ordinals community believes that it enhances the fungibility and versatility of the Bitcoin network. On the other hand, some believe that Ordinal inscriptions consume additional block space and congest the network.
While many in the crypto community praised Bitwise for making its ETF holdings address public, some pointed out a single 12,000 BTC transfer, suggesting that the asset manager did not send any test transactions to verify the address. Others questioned the use of a single key wallet instead of a multisig one, which is considered more secure. A multisig wallet requires multiple private keys to be used simultaneously to access it, similar to a bank’s safe deposit box. By using two or more private keys, a multisig wallet provides additional security for storing crypto assets.
Cointelegraph reached out to Bitwise to inquire about their plans to support Ordinals and the use of single key wallets over multisig ones, but they did not respond at the time of publication.
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