Ordinals, Runes, and the Next Bitcoin Bull Run

[upbeat music] Welcome to another episode of 51 Insights, today with Isabelle Foxen Duke.

Hey, Isabelle, great to have you here. Hi. Thank you so much, Marc. It's nice to be here. Isabelle, where, where are you tuning in from? So I am currently in Puerto Rico.

I'm gonna be traveling to Texas next week for Consensus, for folks who are familiar with that crypto conference. Excited for that. So yeah, traveling around a little bit. Yeah. Cool, cool.

Unfortunately, I'll miss Consensus, but, yeah, maybe next time. Yeah. Isabelle, welcome to the show.

Isabelle is GP at Unbroken Chain, the first Ordinals hedge fund, and previously communications director, uh, of the Ordinals Protocol. Um, Isabelle, welcome to the show.

And before we start, uh, if you like this show, please like, recommend, share it. You can share it on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcast. This helps us keep this going. Isabelle, who are you? What's your story?

So yeah, that's a good place to start. You know, I always like to start by sharing a little bit of the birth story of Ordinals, which I was, you know, kind of blessed to get a front row seat to as comms director.

It actually kinda started, I was, uh, really good friends with Casey Rodarmor in California.

We were just kind of buddies at a, at a Bitcoin meetup in Con- in, in California, and, um, uh, I had been working in marketing and communications in the digital asset space, and he asked me to help him with the press launch for this protocol that he was essentially created in his basement, you know, all by himself, a little inde- independent developer project that was a wild, wild success far beyond anything that we certainly could have ever imagined, and that was the Ordinals Protocol, which, you know, essentially makes NFT-like functio- uh, functionality available on Bitcoin Layer 1, which is, uh, just an unheard of technical advancement in, in crypto prior to that.

So yeah. So I, uh, worked with Casey for about five months after the Ordinals Protocol launch.

Got, like I said, a front row seat to the very, very early days of the Ordinals Protocol, kind of just how that team functioned. It's a very, very, very small team, all nonprofit funded at this point.

And, uh, in May of 2023, I got involved with the first Ordinals hedge fund basically, which was being seeded by Bitcoin Magazine's kind of fund arm. They were very, very bullish on Ordinals right away.

And, uh, yeah, in February of this year, I went full time, uh, as a GP and working kind of on the capital development side for Unbroken Chain, which is the first Ordinals hedge fund.

So lots to say about Ordinals history, but also Ordinals markets more broadly. Mm-hmm. So, uh, you mentioned a front row seat, and then, and I wonder...

I'm wondering when Casey asked you to, like, join this project, why, why did you join? What did you find interesting about it? Well, Casey was really just my friend. You know, I mean, we were just buddies.

I didn't, I didn't realize how big and how crazy things were gonna get, for sure. And I had been, you know, I was sort of cheerleading him on.

I think all of us who were in San Francisco were like, "Oh, this is such a cool project. You know, he's doing something creative.

He's doing something that, you know, is sort of fun and exciting, and a little bit outside the typical box that we see certainly with Layer 1 Bitcoin."

Bitcoin is known for being just this very practical blockchain where you...

we only deal with money and, you know, the only thing that anyone's ever building are, like, wallet software and, like, you know, maybe, like, a Bitcoin marketplace or something like that.

But, you know, there's a pretty narrow, like, industry window for products in, in Bitcoin Layer 1, and so this was, this was, like, a wild idea. Like, oh, how...

maybe there's a way to kind of create these sort of NFT-like things. They're not exactly NFTs, but they function similar to NFTs.

In many ways they outperform, um, NFTs on Ethereum because as we talked about offline, they're 100% fully on-chain.

He figured out a way to get, you know, NFT data, image data, any kind of arbitrary data you want trackable fully 100% on-chain on Bitcoin, which is wild. And so yeah. And so I, I kinda just did it.

Initially, it was just, like, a favor for a friend.

Like, I just, you know, was like, "Oh, I'll help you with the press," 'cause I had, you know, connections in that world and was already working in that world, and it went absolutely crazy.

I mean, I, I think it was the most successful press launch in Bitcoin's history. It was, you know, 48 hours later.

It went from no journalists knowing what it was to 48 hours later, Casey was being so hounded by the press that we eventually actually just took a no interview policy because he, he literally couldn't keep up with all of the demand for his time.

So that certainly flipped my career upside down. I mean, that was the most successful moment in my career, and obviously for his, him as well, and everyone else on the team.

And, uh, everything sort of changed from there on and, and we started to think about what were we gonna do next. Is... Are we gonna build a company? Is this gonna be like the Consensys of Ordinals?

And it, it took a while for the team, and, and specifically Casey to really figure out what he wanted to do, and he, you know, ultimately decided he just wanted the protocol to be completely nonprofit, donation funded,

and just, like, really just stay true to being, like, a completely neutral protocol. So that was again in May 2023. This was about four or five months after the big press launch.

Yeah, he made that final decision that he wasn't gonna, you know, start the big Ordinals corporation and stay nonprofit.

And those of us who were helping him out were kind of on the free market again with, you know, a very, very important, like, moment on our resumes and, you know, a whole new direction in our careers. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, and before we jump into the technical details, I would like to take a step back, as I always do, for people who may not be familiar with Ordinals, who may have heard of Bitcoin and Ethereum, and who knows how those things work, at least superficially.

But what would you tell such a person? Why is Ordinals so significant for Bitcoin and for crypto in general? So the significance of Ordinals for folks coming from other NFT ecosystems.

So if you're, you know, working with NFTs in the Ethereum or Solana ecosystems, the significance of Ordinals is twofold.

Number one, you are now able to trade NFTs on Bitcoin, which is a superior, just liquidity-wise, way huger blockchain, right? I mean, Bitcoin is the original blockchain. It is the kind of undisputed mother blockchain.

It has the biggest brand. It has the most name recognition, and by far and away the most liquidity of any other blockchain, right?

So, so in theory, the growth opportunity from an investment standpoint on the ecosystem side is far larger for Bitcoin if you're just comparing, like, market cap liquidity, right?

Ordinals trade on Bitcoin, NFTs trade on Ethereum, just completely different liquidity profiles. So that's number one for, you know, the significance for the, the NFT community.

I would say the second is that many people don't realize this, but if you get into the weeds of NFTs on Ethereum or Solana, um, most NFTs on Ethereum and Solana are pointers to images that live on centralized servers that

can, can be changed basically by that point of centralization. They are not, you know, immutable, government-resistant, uh, on-chain images for the most part.

There are some exceptions to that, but for the most part, that is a reality of those chains because of their data size limitations in their transactions on their blocks.

So Bitcoin has, you know, substantially wider, uh, data file size constraints in a Bitcoin transaction.

You know, just to put this into perspective, if you, um, are making an Ethereum transaction, you have about, like, a two or three kilobyte size, like, file size limitation.

On Bitcoin, it's about 420 kilobytes for a standard transaction, and for a non-standard tra- transaction, it jumps up to four megabytes. So you can put way, way more data.

You can put full images fully on chain, completely government resistant, completely censorship resistant, completely immutable, impermanent.

Ordinals basically inherit all the security functionality of layer one Bitcoin, and that is just not the case and never will be the case on Ethereum or Solana.

So what this means additionally is that, you know, artists and creators are very attracted to Bitcoin because artists and creators want to put their work on the most immutable, censorship-resistant, permanent blockchain forever.

If you put a piece of art on a blockchain, you wanna put it on the blockchain that you can pass down to your grandkids, right? That you think is most likely to stick around in the long run,

and that is almost certainly Bitcoin. I, I think consensus would agree that that is Bitcoin.

So those are sort of on the, the NFT side, you know, kind of what the implications are for NFTs, and that's why you're seeing all this liquidity getting sucked out of, you know, Ethereum and Solana NFT ecosystems right now and coming into Ordinals.

Solana a little bit less.

I think Solana still has, you know, a, a reasonable user base because it is so much cheaper than the other two, and, and Ordinals still does come with some costs associated with being on a proof of work blockchain.

So, you know, to use Ordinals, you wanna make sure that, you know, you're, you're doing it for a project that's worth the money and that you're willing to invest in.

But certainly I think, uh, you know, liquidity is being sucked out of the Ethereum ecosystem on the NFT side and coming into Ordinals and, uh, and that is largely because people want their, they want their, their NFTs on chain, and they want them on what they consider to be the superior blockchain, right?

Uh, you know, we kind of take the position that the only reason anyone ever cared about Ethereum NFTs was because NFTs weren't possible on Bitcoin in the first place, and, uh, that's now changing, of course.

I'll just add, you know, on the Bitcoin side, in terms of the impacts of Ordinals on Bitcoin, the obvious kind of low-hanging fruit answer to that is adoption, right?

All these users are coming over to Bitcoin after thinking for years and years that Bitcoin was dead, and there's nothing you can do with Bitcoin. It has no utility. Um, and that's all changing.

Not just retail investors are coming over to Bitcoin because they're excited about what's possible, but there's an enormous amount of investment also now coming into Bitcoin, not just on the Ordinals side, but broadly throughout the Bitcoin ecosystem as everyone kinda scratches their heads and asks this question, "What's possible on Bitcoin that maybe we didn't think was possible before?"

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, and, and something I would like to, to mention here is, [clears throat] here as well is that, uh, you mentioned artists, and we work with a lot of consumer brands, and also for consumer brand, brands especially in the luxury space, this could be a very interesting option to ingrain and put something on chain that has to have a very high permanence and immutability.

Mm. So that's just another additional option, and I'm sure there are lots of, lots of use cases we haven't mentioned now.

But I wanna jump back a little bit to the launch of Ordinals last year and, mm, how you managed this from a communication perspective. You had a lot of...

Or you, you pointed out a lot of advantages, but I remember that last year there were also folks who said, uh, "This is a distraction. This isn't true to the original, you know, intention and use case of Bitcoin."

How did you handle that? How did you talk to the community? What was your communication strategy around that? So, you know, I, I, I can't take credit for the strategy.

Casey himself actually has very strong opinions about how communication should be handled.

He is, mm, a very intentional person and a person that, you know, is, is values-driven more than I think he is, you know, driven by public perception or perceived public perception, much to my chagrin as his communications director, by the way.

[chuckles] But, uh, his-- he was very clear that, you know, the maxis, if you wanna call them that, right?

Or like the folks that were, uh, getting up in arms about Ordinals and sort of, mm, criticizing Ordinals, and we can get into some of those criticisms. He went through them all.

I mean, he had already thought this through well before the launch of Ordinals, but, but he, he listened deeply and intently, and he felt very clear that he just had a strong disagreement with them.

And I think that we saw that in the, in the community, right? There was this fissioning in the Bitcoin community about are Ordinals good for Bitcoin? And there w- a splitting.

I would say the split was more like it was, it was more of a minority that I think were really harshly critical of Ordinals, and I think a lot of that had to do with discomfort with all of the cultural cross-pollination coming from other ecosystems, right?

So a lot of folks who are really dedicated and focused on Bitcoin see Ethereum and Solana as a distraction, right?

And so when those participants in the market started coming over to Ordinals, and they really dominate the Ordinals market. I mean, they are the really the ones who truly adopted the technology.

I think that that put a little bit of a bad taste in the mouths of some people who really are, you know, kind of focused on Bitcoin-only projects.

There are a whole slew of other kind of points that we could go through one by one and hash out, but, you know, I think Casey's-- the way we kind of handled it was, you know, are these points valid?

Do we need to address them? And if not, let them talk all they want, you know? I mean, Casey did not... He would never silence anyone, and he felt like, you know, just let them, let them squawk louder.

As a practical matter, they ended up being some of our best marketers, right? I mean, Ordinals started to really explode when Adam Back tweeted a criticism of it, right? It just, it put Ordinals on the map, you know?

So, in many ways, you know, it's like all press is good press. But, you know, on a more serious note, you know, we obviously listened really intently to everyone's points of view and, and I think, you know,

tried to be open to some sort of criticism. But, but, you know, th- we, we disagreed. You know, we just strongly disagreed with their, with their points of view.

And I'll say for myself personally, I found them pretty hypocritical [chuckles] by a lot of the, uh, Bitcoiners out there. So- Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm... we could get into that maybe on a longer form episode. [laughs] Yeah, sure.

Sure. Yeah, cool. So interesting, uh, you then, uh, started Unbroken Chain, the first Ordinals hedge fund.

Uh, what was the idea behind Unbroken Chain, and why do you think it was interesting looking at this new technology from an investment perspective? So, so my-- It was founded by my partner, Asher Corson.

He and UTXO Management, which was the fund arm of Bitcoin Magazine, they were really kind of the founding partners who got together and had this idea to invest in an Ordinals trading strategy.

I came on pretty quickly thereafter, but, um, I wanna give credit where credit is due. I think that there were...

The real kind of incentive to create this fund was that w- they wanted to create a vehicle where institutions or really any kind of investor, it doesn't really matter what kind of investor, high net worth, prop traders, whoever, could invest in a diversified Ordinals trading strategy that gave that particular investor exposure to the broad range of Ordinals assets that were being created, instead of just investing in the infrastructure and kind of venture capital plays which are more common in crypto, right?

So most investors in the crypto ecosystem are venture capital investors, and the traditional playbook for venture capital in crypto is investing in some kind of technical protocol, infrastructure, whatever the case may be, and usually get- getting some kind of token allocation, early token allocation, premium discounts on the token that theoretically they can get liquidity on, often at the expense of retail, right?

I mean, I'm just gonna say that, right? Like these are, these are people who are by definition getting in at better prices, at advantaged prices relative to retail buyers. Hmm.

That strategy is not the same as buying and holding Bitcoin, right? Or buying and holding Ethereum. And so what's the parallel in Ordinals? You could do venture capital with, like, Ordinals infrastructure, right?

You could invest in Ordinals bot launchpad and try to get Ordinals bot tokens allocation. You could invest in Magic Eden coin or whatever.

But that's not gonna give you exposure to the actual underlying assets that are being traded.

That's not gonna give you a- you know, that's not gonna give you exposure to, you know, the Bitcoin Rocks and the Node Monks and the Puppets and all these projects that, as a practical matter, is where the real liquidity is making their bets.

And so we wanted to create a vehicle where investors, and sophisticated investors, could get access to a broad range of actual Ordinals assets, actual Bitcoin native assets, rather than just investing in the infra around it.

Mm-hmm.

And I wanna, at this point, broaden this up a bit because I think that's a really, really interesting narrative, and something that plays into that narrative as well is what came along a couple of months ago, which is called Bitcoin Runes.

And I would love if we can shortly deep dive into Runes as well and explain the audience what this is and why it is, why it is significant, and how it connects now to what you just said, the broader nar- narrative of the investment landscape changing and, like, k- then a kind of the power shift.

Yeah. So, you know, if you think about Ordinals, when Ordinals launched, it was immediately correlated to NFTs, right? So traditional NFTs you think of as like, you know, monkey pictures or, you know, whatever.

Usually image JPEG data of some kind. In the Ethereum ecosystem, that's very separate than the fungible strategies, right? They're not technically that connected, right?

The fungible strategies being more like the ICO, like token creation, even blockchain creation strategy. In Ordinals, they're a little bit more connected because after Ordinals launched,

a guy named Domo, who actually also happens to be a GP in our fund, decided that he was gonna use underlying Ordinals technology to create a fungible token standard.

So he created a fungible token standard that leverages the underlying architecture of Ordinals.

And again, we can get into how that works if we really wanna get into the tech, but I know we're time crunched, so I'll spare everyone the technical details.

But essentially, imagine you have layer one Bitcoin on the bottom, Ordinals built on top, and then this other person named Domo, who has nothing to do with Casey, he created a fungible token standard called BRC-20 on top of Ordinals.

So it's like a layered cake. Layer one Bitcoin, Ordinals, BRC-20, in terms of how the architecture is dependent on one another. And BRC-20 went completely nuts. It went s- super, super crazy.

I think at one point, you know, one-- like 90% of all liquidity in Ordinals was just in BRC-20 tokens. So BRC-20 was a massive success. It blew up the Ordinals ecosystem.

A ton of the liquidity that, you know, a ton of the profits that were made in BRC-20 token trading got cycled back into Ordinals, and that arguably blew up Ordinals' NFT ecosystem even more.

It was a major pivotal point in Ordinals' ecosystem growth, this development of this BRC-20 token standard that was created by Domo.

And the challenge with this, right, was that this token standard, because it uses all of these technical layers of Bitcoin, is a little inefficient, right? It came with some technical inefficiencies.

You know, it required, like, it, sort of like, you know, being criticized for sort of congesting the blockchain and driving up network fees and all of these things.

And so Casey, who is the creator, original creator of Ordinals, decided that he was gonna try to compete with BRC-20, and he was gonna try to create a cleaner, more efficient fungible token standard that still leveraged layer one Bitcoin, but he was gonna cut Ordinals, the middleman, out of it and just create a fungible token standard straight on top of layer one Bitcoin using a different part of Bitcoin's architecture.

And so Runes, that was called Runes, and Runes just launched about a month ago. Almost exactly a month ago. And so we now have this ecosystem of fungible tokens being built on top of layer one Bitcoin,

uh, really as a result of Ordinals, right? I mean, none of this would exist without Ordinals.

It's like Ordinals is, like, a contagious virus that has sort of like, you know, spiraled into all this development and inspired all this development on Bitcoin. And so, yeah.

So that's-- You know, now we see there's, you know, hundreds and hundreds of businesses being built around Runes and Ordinals and BRC-20, and it's just this wild ecosystem that is just exploding, kind of like wildfire.

Mm-hmm. And, and how do you think Runes plays into that narrative of an invest- in- for changing investment landscape in crypto? Oof, that's a really good question. So

I think, you know, one thing I'm conscious of, and I'll just say this when I talk about Runes, is that when people-- People are obviously very excited about Ordinals. Ordinals is kind of like the hot new thing, right?

You hear this when you go to conferences, even like Web3 crypto conferences. There's this Bitcoin renaissance, in quotes, happening, and people are kind of coming back to Bitcoin, getting excited about Bitcoin.

And I think a lot of folks in that world, when they heard about Runes, they got really, really excited about, you know, oh, is this gonna be the new DeFi play? And I think in some ways that is starting to happen, right?

We are going to start to see, you know, lending products on Bitcoin and staking products in Bitcoin and all this different investment that's coming into Bitcoin.

But it's, it's- Technically still very different than Ethereum, and still

there are some, like, challenges, technical challenge, I think, in, in, in replicating exactly what we had on Ethereum on these Bitcoin native, uh, on these Bitcoin native networks for various reasons.

And so I think that that is something that maybe I would just sort of caution investors around is like, yes, this is really exciting, and I, I personally think that retail in particular is gonna be driving this boom, uh, into these ecosystems, and that investors will ultimately follow retail rather than the other way around, which was the belief with Ethereum.

Um, but yeah.

But I think that, like, we all should kind of like calm down, and we need to kind of get a little bit more realistic and s- and, and try to understand this new ecosystem and the differences between this technology and what happened on Ethereum in the 2020 and 2017 cycles.

Mm-hmm. So yeah. So I would, I would caution people not to be s- overly excited, and, and I would caution them not to,

not to expect that the exact same playbooks that worked on Ethereum and Solana are gonna work on Bitcoin. This is a new beast. It's a new beast.

It's new technology, different pros and cons, different technical constraints, and the way, um, the world of finance develops, if you wanna th- think about it that way, on Bitcoin will be different than it will be on Ethereum.

So I would say be cautious not to, you know, just assume that the old Ethereum or Web3 playbooks in the investment world are going to map right onto Bitcoin, and the, and the best example of that is venture capital, right?

Like, this venture capital, you know, token allocation strategy.

It may have some legs in Bitcoin, but retail, I think, is really screaming that the reason they love Bitcoin is 'cause it's fair launch, and the reason they love Ordinals is because it's fair launch.

And I think that they're, they're going to prioritize and they're gonna put their money in those fair launch projects. I think that the days of, you know, whitelists for VCs and then dumping on retail are numbered.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Uh, and now a hypothetical scenario. If you talk to, uh, an investor with, on Broken Chain, what do you tell those investors that might not be entirely familiar with Ordinals or Runes?

How should they look at that protocol, and how should they understand the market?

And are there specific projects that you are excited about, or how do those, this, the mechanics work, and what, what's different than traditional crypto?

So the, the most straightforward answer to that question is that Bitcoin currently at the moment in its current form doesn't support smart contracts, and so if you really wanna, like, break down what that means in layman terms, it doesn't support trustless conditional transactions, right?

So, you know, if this condition is, uh, condition is satisfied, then, you know, the tr- then this transaction executed, basically.

I mean, that's, that's like the most, most basic way that I can say that, um, most boiled down.

And that fundamentally changes, you know, kind of what can be done in a trustless way, and this is a really key distinction because you can do almost anything you can do in Ethereum on Bitcoin as long as you're willing to take on some custodial risk.

But custodial risk in crypto has proven to be significant. I mean, custodial risk is how people lose a lot of money in crypto. That's how you go to zero, right? I mean, especially on something like Bitcoin.

So I think a lot of people will obviously take custody risk in order to accomplish their financial goals in this new ecosystem, and there-- I would say there are some, again, there are some exceptions.

There are some interesting trustless technologies or, or sup- super trust minimized technologies developing on Bitcoin.

But a lot of things that you can do on Ethereum in a relatively trustless way are just not possible to do without custody risk on Bitcoin. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Okay.

So let's shift gear a bit for the last part of this episode, and let's focus a bit on the future.

Uh, when you look at Ordinals, what are things that are, uh, that you're most excited about, and what may be some consumer applications that may be built on top of that? So I'll say there's two answers to that question.

So the things that I'm actually most excited about just literally are the use case of collectibles. You know? So I am a Bitcoiner, you know.

I, I, I buy into Bitcoin as, you know, it's for its hard money properties first and foremost, and I see things like traditional fine art being valuable for similar reasons, right?

So you don't spend $50 million on a Picasso just because you like the way it looks. You spend it because of provenance, history, and scarcity, right?

I mean, scarcity is a key factor in the, in, in the valuations of fine art and rare art.

Um, it's the sort of weird intersection, I think, fine art between, like, social consensus about what's valuable and actual physical scarcity.

And you're starting to see-- You'd already started to see that exact same use case play out in Ethereum NFTs, and that is going to come to Bitcoin with an even greater degree of, kind of luxury associated with it because it is fully on chain, completely governent- governent- government resistant.

As you mentioned, the provenance is, like- Even more, like, substantial, I would argue, for a variety of reasons that we could get into in a longer form podcast, right?

And so I actually personally think that what makes ordinals interesting is just the use case that already exists, and I, I think we're gonna see a ton of money flowing into this ecosystem for the same reasons that we see lots of money flowing into fine art.

I mean, people forget, fine art was the number-- fastest growing asset class in the world in 2020, other than Bitcoin and crypto. So yeah. So I always just like to point that out.

I think people, I think especially VCs, like to kind of poo-poo the collectibles narrative of like, "Oh, that's just gambling. Oh, those meme coins, they're just silly playthings."

But the truth of the matter is, is that, like, a, a meme coin even with provable scarcity, and a good marketing team might actually be a s- much better investment than a ton of, you know, shots in the dark at some technology that might not actually be useful in 10 years.

So yeah, that's-- I think that, that,

that's what we're gonna start to see more of is I think, you know, especially with retail, like they, they see these things as investments first and foremost, and they wanna make good financial decisions, and they're trying to make money.

And I think that this reality of, you know, utility is, is not actually the thing that necessarily makes a good investment. I mean, that is a narrative that venture capital likes to spi- spin because it benefits them.

It rationalizes them getting early, you know, extractions.

But the, the truth of the matter is, is that, you know, if utility were the most important factor in what made a good investment, you know, steel would be outperforming gold, and that's just not the case, right?

So I think that this whole narrative, especially in crypto VC landia, that like, "Oh, the meme coins are dumb, and, you know, it's all about utility and changing the future," that's a very convenient narrative if you wanna rationalize taking a cut early for giving developers money.

And that is a narrative that I think is going to be-- I think we're already seeing it, right? I mean, this cycle so far, we're early, but it's already been the cycle of meme coins.

It's already been the cycle of ordinals. Retail is sort of getting hip that they don't need to buy into that narrative in order to make solid investment decisions necessarily, or even just play the gambling ring.

You know? Some of them just wanna gamble, and that's fine, too. You know? We're-- I'm-- we're freedom maxis over here. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So I, yeah.

That's, that's my, my prediction, is that this, um, era of the meme coin, which to some extent ordinals and NFTs in general are beneficiaries of, will continue through this cycle. And we're- Mm-hmm...

gonna see, you know, this sort of obsession with, like, utility plays potentially soften a little bit this cycle. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And you, you're obviously very deeply entrenched in the Bitcoin ecosystem in general.

Uh, when you look into the future for Bitcoin as well, what are some things that you are most excited about for Bitcoin in general? I mean, you mentioned the Bitcoin renaissance at the beginning of the episode.

What does that mean? Oof. Yeah. Well, so the, the Bitcoin renaissance I think is really a reference to all of this new-- renewed, not new.

Renewed interest kind of coming to Bitcoin, again, both on the retail investor side, but also on the institutional investment side. Yeah.

As far as what that could look like in the future, what I hope and at least what I foresee happening this cycle is just continued liquidity leaving other eco- ecosystems to come back to Bitcoin, right?

I mean, our, our thesis as a fund was certainly, you know, if you can do it on Bitcoin, why wouldn't you? The, the problem in the past is that you haven't been able to do it on Bitcoin.

These things weren't possible on Bitcoin. But that's all changing now. I mean, that entire assumption is being called into question.

I do think, going back, not to harp too much on the VCs, not to give them too hard of a time, but I do think that one of the ways that VCs is, are responding to this is that, you know, they're not really comfortable, like, investing in Node Monks and investing in Bitcoin Puppets or, you know, these meme coins.

It doesn't sort of work with their way that they see the world.

But what you're gonna see is probably, and what you are seeing, is they're gonna be investing in these L2s on top of Bitcoin, these layer two technologies that often do have their own separate token that isn't just Bitcoin.

And so you're, you're probably gonna see people kind of attempting to do, again, the same thing that they did on Ethereum in the Bitcoin ecosystem, but in a slightly d- adjacent part of the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Um, and we- Mm-hmm... we're already seeing that happen. So yeah. I mean, I just think everything's gonna be Bitcoin flavored this cycle. You know?

Bitcoin is the cool kid on the block again, and that's gonna look a million different ways. That's gonna touch ordinals. That's gonna touch runes. That's gonna touch this whole L2.

In VC landia, I think the focus will be on these sort of L2 plays where they can get their tokens that they're, you know, used to and like getting. And yeah.

I think that, you know, this is gonna-- there's gonna be a diverse range of ways in which everything is just a little Bitcoin flavored this cycle, and that Bitcoin- Mm-hmm... flavored things will have an advantage.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Bitcoin flavored. I-Isobel, uh, that was a super interesting episode. We can continue that discussion for, uh, hours. Uh, it's, it's-- there's so many topics we, we couldn't touch yet.

But before we, we stop the show, I would like to do a very quick lightning round with you. Ask you a couple of short questions with very short answers, mostly yes or no. Yeah, and- Let's do it. Yeah. Let's, let's do it.

Yeah. First one, Bitcoin or Ethereum? Bitcoin, duh. [laughs] Easy. The most, the, the most creative use case of an ordinal you've seen. Wow, that's really hard. I would- Or your- [laughs] What? Or your favorite use case.

My favorite use case, again, other than just pure collectibles, which I love, that's where my heart is.

I would say my favorite use case, uh, of Ordinals and my favorite Ordinals project so far outside of a pure collectibles play has been, um, inscribing Julian Assange's papers.

So the other major use case for inscriptions that I really love, this isn't an industrial use case, but it's a very interesting, important one, is that you can inscribe important historical documents, you can inscribe political messages, you can inscribe any kind of writing that you want on Bitcoin, and it is completely government resistant, censorship resistant.

I mean, people in China are posting pictures of Tiananmen Square on the blockchain, and the government can't do anything about it. So that's probably my favorite use case for Ordinals- Mm-hmm... I have to say. Yeah.

That's super cool. And inscribing means, just to make our listeners understanding, and inscribing means the text is on chain. Correct. Exactly. Yeah. So you're taking an Ordinal...

This is actually a really great just TLDR on the tech.

You're taking an Ordinal, which is basically just a Satoshi on the Bitcoin blockchain with a serial number on it, and you are making a transaction with that Satoshi, with that Ordinal, and in the transaction there's a little memo field called the witness data of the transaction field.

Technical people will know what I'm talking about. And you can put any data you want in there. You can put 420 kilobytes worth of data.

You can put papers, you can put images, you can put anything, and that data will be associated with that Ordinal for the rest of time once that transaction is mined. Yeah, that's, that's amazing. So next question.

M- what was your first Ordinal? My first Ordinal was a Bitcoin Frog. So [laughs] which was the f- which was thought to be the first 10K PFP collection on Bitcoin.

It was a free 10,000 piece mint that, like, all these Ordinals KOLs just basically got airdropped and, you know, somebody gave me one and they ran up to, like, half a Bitcoin a piece at one point.

I mean, it was absolutely crazy. I literally, just a friend gave it to me for free when it was worth nothing, and then it ripped up to half a Bitcoin.

They've, you know, retraced significantly since then, and there's a bunch of other projects that have come and sucked the liquidity out of that project.

But, uh, yeah, that was, that was my first Ordinal and the Ordinal OGs, they all had Bitcoin Frogs. They'll tell you- Yeah... about the Frogs. [laughs] Cool. Cool.

The next one, when was the first time you heard about crypto? I, [laughs] so I went on a internet date, and I was running a separate business. I was running a marketing business in Web2 at the time.

This was, like, several years ago. And I literally went on a blind date.

I went, like, on a blind date in San Francisco, and we were talking about politics and economics and, you know, whatever, all the things that you talk about on blind dates. And, uh, he said, "Have you heard of Bitcoin?"

You know? He was, like, asking me about it. And I was like, "Oh, well, I've heard of it, but I don't really know anything about it."

And then he sent me this, I think it was, like, a Raoul Pal or Michael Saylor video or one of these YouTubes. And I watched, and that was, that was the end for me. I fell down the rabbit hole.

Once I understood why the dollar doesn't work, I was, I was sold. You know? Yeah. Yeah. The rest was just, you know, continued learning. Yeah. What's one book everyone should read to understand Bitcoin better? Mm.

Ooh, that is a really good question. I mean, probably, probably Sayfedean. I mean, I don't know if that's boring to say Sayfedean's book, uh, The Bitcoin Standard.

That's, like, the, the, you know, the canonical tome about Bitcoin. I'm trying to think if there's another one that I can, that's a little bit more exotic. Maybe Mark Goodwin.

Mark Goodwin, who's the editor-in-chief of, um, Bitcoin Magazine, he recently put out a book called The Bitcoin Dollar, I believe.

And that book is a really interesting kind of future telling of what the world might look like and how this sort of Bitcoin dollar relationship could potentially, how that could evolve over time. So I like that book.

I'll give a plug for that book, The Bitcoin Dollar. Okay. Mm-hmm. What's the biggest myth about Bitcoin? The biggest myth about Bitcoin is that it is bad for the planet. That's the biggest myth about Bitcoin.

Obviously, you know, it...

That it's a incredibly complex conversation, but I think the more I learn about how Bitcoin is mined and the way that the ener- that that energy is changing and how energy allocation is changing as a result of Bitcoin mining and how energy usage is becoming more efficient as a result of Bitcoin mining and all of these different things, when you really get into the guts of it,

you know, I think that there, there's a strong argument to be made that, you know, Bitcoin, uh, Bitcoin mining is changing energy, energy usage, energy politics, and the energy industry probably for the better over time.

Mm-hmm. What's the biggest opportunity of Bitcoin? The biggest opportunity is a hedge against the dollar. I mean, it's really as simple as that.

I don't know if that's too boring, but, but I mean, I just, I, again, I'm, I'm such a Bitcoiner, I can't not say that, you know? Mm-hmm.

I, I often just tell people, I'm like, "All you need to do is, like, buy and hold it." I guess maybe if I wanted to get a little bit more, again, exotic than that or kind of...

You know, and I would say the best opportunity other than that is Ordinals. If you are, know how to trade or, or have, like, a fund manager that you trust to, to trade well on your behalf.

But I, I do think that the Ordinals ecosystem and specifically Ordinals assets, not Ordinals companies. There might be a couple winners in the Ordinals companies, but you wanna own the underlying assets, right?

Like, I often say to people, you know, "Did you wanna buy Bitcoin or do you wanna buy a Bitcoin company?" It's the same thing with ordinals.

Do you wanna own an ordinals company or do you wanna own like an actual index of real ordinals assets that are like professionally managed? Probably you wanna own the underlying asset index. Okay.

And last one, if there's anything you could tell anyone inside or outside of crypto, what would it be? Oof. Inside or outside of crypto?

I would, I'd probably, I mean, [laughs] I would probably try to-- this was what I was gonna say other than the environmental politics piece of things.

I was gonna say the other thing that always kind of stresses me out are, is when people kind of poo-poo Bitcoin's volatility.

And what I would probably do, I feel like the, that the thing I always wanna help people through is that like volatility is good.

Volatility is fundamentally good, and like let me hold your hand and explain to you why in this current economic environment, and when I say current, I mean like economic environment of the past 30 years and almost certainly for the next 10 to 20, um, you want to be holding assets that are, you know, quote unquote vile- volatile, AKA have room to grow.

So, um, yeah, that's, that's probably the direction I would take that question. All right. Isabelle, thank you so much for coming on the show. It was a pleasure. If you like this, please comment, please share.

Um, you can see us on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. Isabelle, where can people find out more about you and Unbroken Chain?

So I don't know when this podcast will be out, uh, but, but in a couple weeks from the time we're recording, we're gonna have unbrokenchain.fund up, uh, which is where, you know, our website is.

You can learn more about us, you can contact us, you can hit us up, like we love to talk about this stuff. Like if you're interested in learning more about the fund, uh, shout out to us any way you want.

Um, but I would say if the, if the website isn't up or when folks are looking at this, also Twitter, you know, we're pretty active on Twitter.

You can reach me, @isabellefoxenduke, you know, message me anytime or unbroken, @unbrokenchaingp, um, is, is the fund's Twitter and, you know, either of those places you can reach me and my partner Asher and like we love to just talk about ordinals and geek out about ordinals, and we're talking to investors and prospective investors all day, so don't be shy.

Perfect. We'll link all of that in the show notes. Uh, again, Isabelle, thank you so much for coming and, uh, all the best. Thanks. [outro music]