A cryptic message has recently surfaced on the Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain, leaving the crypto community buzzing with curiosity.
The message, discovered within Ordinals inscription 55,365,041, has ignited the imaginations of Bitcoin enthusiasts. Many are eager to decipher its enigmatic meaning and speculate about the possibility of a new and intriguing Ordinals art project. The message reads:
“10,000 sats, side by side. A single UTXO, untouched inside. Born together, cursed at heart. Built with code, Bitcoin Art.”
Accompanying this cryptic text is a sequence of numbers, 391481082118 – 391481092117.
BREAKING: A mysterious message was just inscribed on an Uncommon Sat which appears to have on-chain ties to an unrevealed 10K collection inscribed 1 hour before the Jubilee
Message → https://t.co/LvKQuQsrrG
Parent → https://t.co/Sf7vqH5jhf
Children → https://t.co/BYC78QH0iH pic.twitter.com/SBRYZtiFhW— Ord.io (@ord_io) January 15, 2024
What Does the Message Mean?
To understand the cryptic message fully, we need to delve into the intricacies of the cryptocurrency world.
In the realm of cryptocurrency, “UTXO” stands for Unspent Transaction Output, referring to the remaining amount of a particular cryptocurrency, such as Bitcoin, after a transaction has occurred.
These unspent funds can subsequently be used in new transactions, providing a foundation for the broader blockchain ecosystem.
The mysterious message has left the Ordinals community puzzled, with many speculating that it could hint at a potential Ordinals art project or NFT profile picture (PFP) collection.
It’s worth noting that numerous NFT projects feature 10,000 unique images or assets, making this interpretation a plausible theory.
However, until more details emerge, Bitcoin enthusiasts can only engage in speculative sleuthing while searching for clues before any official revelation occurs.
Not Much Details in the Ordinals Inscription
Leonidas, a pseudonymous NFT historian and Ordinals collector claimed they “didn’t really leave us much info about what the collection actually is.”
The repeating nature of the inscription, akin to the famous “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” message from the classic film “The Shining,” further intensifies the mystery.
The phrase “Born together, cursed at heart” could allude to the inscription’s association with a “cursed” parent Ordinal.
A quick search on Ordiscan reveals a connection to another inscription, -471,460, which features an image of a tower or obelisk.
While the term “Cursed Ordinals” might evoke notions of a horror movie, it actually refers to Ordinals that were initially overlooked by the Ord indexer, resulting in their absence from wallets and marketplaces.
These cursed inscriptions, like the tower image, were assigned negative numbers until the issue was resolved.
“The original version of the Ordinals indexer did not catch them; the newer versions do,” Leonidas explained, clarifying that giving these inscriptions negative numbers was the solution.
Other Inscriptions Tied in the Mystery
Interestingly, the so-called “cursed ordinal” had ties to another parent inscription, 53,383,387, which featured a white door under a black arch.
“We just had the Jubilee upgrade a week ago that ‘blessed’ the edge cases that cause cursed inscriptions. So now all new inscriptions created in weird ways get a normal positive number and are not cursed.”
This update, however, leaves the previously cursed inscriptions forever marked with negative numbers, effectively locking a supply of approximately 470,000 cursed inscriptions.
Since the launch of the Ordinals protocol in January of the previous year, over 55 million items have been minted on the Bitcoin blockchain, as reported by a Dune data dashboard.
These items encompass a wide range of content, from a clone of the classic first-person shooter Doom to a Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) emulator.
Additionally, artists and collectors have utilized Ordinals to inscribe artwork and PFP collections on the blockchain while establishing a standard for deploying fungible tokens on Bitcoin.