Elon Musk slams NFTs but ends up arguing the case for Bitcoin Ordinals
2 min read
While publicly mocking non-fungible token (NFTs) during a podcast, Tesla CEO and billionaire Elon Musk appears to have inadvertently highlighted the case for Bitcoin Ordinals, also known as Bitcoin NFTs.
“The funny thing is the NFT is not even on the blockchain — it’s just a URL to the JPEG,” said Musk in an Oct. 31 released
The criticisms from Musk toward NFTs aren’t new. In December 2021, he mocked NFTs as a sign of mental illness in a meme showing a patient lying on a therapist’s couch.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 16, 2021
Musk’s comments however don’t stand true for all NFT projects on Ethereum.
For example, Larva Labs moved its Cryptopunks NFTs on-chain in August 2021 after they lived off-chain for the first four years.
“Storing them on-chain in this way would further cement the long-term survival of the Cryptopunks images and attributes, and ensure that they can be fully accessed by anyone with only an Ethereum client,” Larva Labs in the statement.
.@elonmusk is correct that having NFT merely provide an http link to someone’s domain is silly.
However, with rare exceptions, it’s also silly to insist NFT content be on chain,
IPFS links, with the content backed by whoever owns the NFT is the natural solution.
— Arthur B. (@ArthurB) November 1, 2023
Related: Are NFT markets in a death spiral or ready for a resurgence?
Metagood, the team behind the Ethereum-native OnChainMonkeys, announced in September that it would migrate its NFTs to Bitcoin.
While the firm’s CEO Danny Yang didn’t directly address the JPEG dilemma, he explained that NFTs “will win on Bitcoin” because it is a more secure network to work from:
“The Bitcoin Ordinal protocol is better designed for decentralization and security than the Ethereum NFT protocol. High-value NFTs will win on Bitcoin.”
However, Ethereum still remains home to 84% of all NFT trading volumes, according to CoinGecko, sourcing data from June. Bitcoin and ImmutableX came in second and third with market shares of 11% and 2.5% respectively.
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