Original author:Jaleel、Jack，BlockBeats
Yuga Labs recently successfully issued the TwelveFold series of NFTs on the Bitcoin network through Ordinals, generating over $16 million in revenue in just 24 hours. However, the auction of Yuga Labs received severe criticism from the founder of Ordinals and his team, and proposed to use PSBT technology to replace the auction mode adopted by Yuga Labs, which triggered heated discussions in the community. Why do Ordinals question Yuga Labs? What is PSBT technology? How does it solve the transaction problem of Bitcoin NFT?
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A bubble chart, Yuga Labs circled away 16 million US dollars
On the morning of March 7th, Yuga Labs officially announced that the auction of TwelveFold has ended, and the top 288 successful bidders will receive the inscription within a week. During the 24-hour auction, Yuga Labs received a total of 735 BTC, worth about $16 million, with the highest bidder paying $161,000.
Even in the current volatile market, Yuga Labs' NFT experiments on the Bitcoin network still created great topics and economic effects. Just relying on a "bubble chart", Yuga Labs has harvested more than 16 million US dollars.The auction of the TwelveFold series exhibited 300 NFTs, all of which were minted and issued through Oedinals, of which 288 were used for auction sales, and 12 were reserved for donations, donations and charity. This is the first time Yuga Labs has turned its attention to Bitcoin NFTs, and the TwelveFold series is also the first major Yuga NFT series off the ETH chain. (BlockBeats note, read more about the Twelvefold auction in "Will Yuga Labs issue Bitcoin NFT, will it become the "singularity" of Ordinals ecology?", for more information about the Ordinals protocol, please read "》。）
Interpretation of the Ordinals protocol controversy: Is it okay to issue NFT on the Bitcoin blockchain?
Without a doubt, Twelvefold was another big win for the Yuga dynasty. Open Twitter, the community is full of words of appreciation for Yuga Labs: "Yuga chose Bitcoin as the first stop for outward expansion, injecting a strong catalyst into the Bitcoin NFT ecosystem", "Yuga's Web3 top IP will Warmly welcomed everywhere, especially the oldest and most consensus blockchain in the world". Others commented that the TwelveFold series "has achieved great financial success and exceeded original expectations. It is novel and conceptual, beautiful and technical."
Some people even think that since apes and mutant, Yuga has never cared about artists, only about making money. Almost everyone knows BAYC, but few people know the artist allseeingseneca who created it. What's more, the Twelvefold series has no artistic value, only Yuga's brand value, and brand value is not art. When the brand disappears, its value will drop sharply, but on the contrary, after the artist's death, his works will greatly decrease. appreciation.
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"Ignorance and incompetence!", question from Ordinals
However, the most surprising thing is not the sporadic doubts above, but the severe criticism from the founder of Ordinals and his team. You know, the TwelveFold series was originally launched through the Bitcoin NFT based on the Ordinals protocol, but Casey Rodarmor, the founder of Ordinals, has published and retweeted a lot of content since March 5, scolding the Yuga Labs team for establishing an extremely poor Bitcoin NFT auction process precedent.
In the tweet, Casey Rodarmor wrote: "The Yuga Labs team lacks integrity, ignorance, incompetence, empathy, immaturity and insensitivity." He believes that Yuga Labs' auction is a profound negative signal that cannot be ignored. Seeing Yuga Labs behave like this again, he will encourage everyone to boycott Yuga Labs forever. Casey even thinks that the Yuga Labs employees are a bunch of liars, both literally and figuratively, and should resign and repent by doing honest work.
What got Casey so excited? This requires a look at the specific process of the TwelveFold auction. In order to host this unprecedented auction feast on the Bitcoin network, Yuga Labs simply adopted a hosted auction model. During the bidding process, all bidding funds are required to be transferred to Yuga’s address for custody. Within 24 hours after the bidding ends, Yuga will return the unsuccessful bidding funds to the receiving address, which is a crime against Bitcoin fundamentalists and even A taboo for the entire Bitcoin community.
We know that after experiencing incidents such as MtGox and QuadrigaCX, self-custody has become the most valued technical value in the Bitcoin community, because as long as it involves custody, trust is required. In the encrypted world, it is obviously a luxury to hope for the moral bottom line of the project party, and there are extremely high risks. Because the custody risk can only be placed on the moral bottom line of the custodian, the project party should use blockchain technology to reduce the risk of asset custody. In this regard, Casey also said that the auction model like Yuga Labs is a hotbed for cultivating scams. Yuga Labs, as the leader and pioneer of the NFT movement, could have waited for a more mature opportunity or helped build infrastructure to organize a safer and more refined Instead of being as irresponsible as it is now.
It was also found that Yuga Labs ignored the most basic pre-steps of screening auction addresses. During the bidding process, there were even Bitcoin addresses that were incompatible with Taproots. After the auction was completed, there were still 14 incompatible addresses in the top 288. Yuga Labs did not simply screen these addresses from beginning to end. It is reported that successful bidders will receive the inscriptions within a week, while incompatible successful addresses will not receive the inscriptions. The official response and plan for the handling of these 14 NFTs has not yet been given. Many people believe that Yuga released NFT on the Bitcoin network but did not cooperate with Bitcoin developers, which reflects to a certain extent that Yuga Labs is not well prepared for this auction, its technology is not professional, and its attitude is not correct.
Seeing such doubts, some Ethereum eco-users pointed out that Yuga's auction event just illustrates the importance of ETH smart contracts. After having a programmable smart contract, there is no need for trust, and the risk of centralized custody is avoided, so that the auction of this type of custody will not happen. These are "the pains that must be borne by the rebirth of Bitcoin NFT and the road that cannot be avoided."
As soon as this reply was released, the scolding battle against Yuga Labs turned into a discussion session on "How PSBT solves Bitcoin NFT transactions". People left messages below: What technology is PSBT?
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What are PSBTs? How does it solve the transaction problem of Bitcoin NFT?
"PSBT is actually a very basic technology. Of course, now that Bitcoin has NFT, these originally conceived things have application scenarios," BTCStudy contributor A Jian said in an interview. In fact, PSBT has a long history in the history of Bitcoin development, and it is one of the most basic and important protocols in the Bitcoin network.
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PSBT History
PSBT is the abbreviation of "Partially Signed Bitcoin Transactions" (Partially Signed Bitcoin Transactions), which was designed by BTC core developer Andrew Chow. Andrew initially planned to develop the PSBT protocol because he found that different Bitcoin soft and hard wallets cannot achieve input and output compatibility, and a set of standards is urgently needed to solve this problem.
In the Bitcoin ecosystem, each hardware and software wallet seems to have its own unique serialization standard paradigm. This inconsistency in standards makes the serialization between wallet software incompatible and becomes a nightmare for Bitcoin transactions. . The role of PSBT is to distinguish the complex transaction structure from the actual signature of the transaction, allowing transactions between different software to achieve non-interactive signatures. Anyone who collects enough PSBT can combine the generated partially signed transactions into a fully signed transaction.
PSBT was introduced into the Bitcoin network through BIP-174 in July 2017, and described the detailed specifications of the protocol in this original version named "0 PSBT". Afterwards, PSBT gradually gained support from other developers and continued to support It's perfect.
In January 2021, in the new BIP-370, PSBT updated version 2 "2 PSBT". Interestingly, PSBT jumped directly from "version 0" to "version 2", without "version 1".
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How PSBTs work
The role played by PSBT in the development of Bitcoin NFT is to realize the de-trust of transactions without smart contracts. The core of this standard is to create an incompletely signed transaction and some data related to it to assist the transmission of unsigned transactions and promote the portability of unsigned transactions, allowing multiple parties to sign the same transaction more easily. (BlockBeats note, for more on PSBT, please read "What is a "Partially Signed Bitcoin Transaction (PSBT)"?》）
What is a "Partially Signed Bitcoin Transaction (PSBT)"?
For example, a hardware wallet user wants to initiate a Coin Join transaction. Before PSBT, this operation process is very complicated, because the Bitcoin software wallet is not compatible with the input/output sequence sent by the hardware wallet. The function of PSBT is to let the software wallet first construct the transaction content such as the input/output of the transaction and UXTO (that is, the fund set), form an unsigned transaction, and then send it to the hardware wallet. After the hardware wallet receives the PSBT, it signs the transaction, and the transaction is officially executed.
At present, the PSBT standard has been widely adopted by Bitcoin hardware wallets, software wallets, and node software. Although this standard still has some flaws, as far as it is concerned, it has greatly strengthened the interoperability between Bitcoin software and hardware, making the process of entrusting transactions completely trustless. PSBT greatly assists the operation of CoinJoin and other cooperative transactions, and also makes multi-signature easier to use. It will be a basic but key technology in the application scenario of Bitcoin NFT.
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How does PSBT realize trustless Bitcoin NFT transactions?
In this regard, A Jian gave his own idea in an interview with BlockBeats: Suppose there is a pair of Bitcoin NFT traders, and the public key of the NFT seller is information known to both parties. When initiating an NFT transaction, the buyer first writes his own UTXO input and an output to undertake the NFT in the transaction. After the buyer constructs the transaction and signs it, he converts it into PSBT and sends it to the seller. The seller signs the message after receiving the message through an intermediary service provider, etc., and the Bitcoin NFT transaction is completed.
The entire process described above is completely trustless for both buyers and sellers. For the buyer, information such as bidding price and acceptance address has been built in the transaction in advance, and once it is changed, the signature will become invalid. For the seller, the NFT will only be sold if the signature is completed by itself, and the price is measured by its own review. In A Jian's view, this simple transaction structure also largely eliminates the commission space of NFT transaction intermediary service providers such as OpenSea and Blur. "As long as the seller's information channel is smooth, there is no need for an intermediary at all, because A transaction signed by the buyer is directly an offer.”
At this point, you may be thinking that PSBT solves P2P NFT transactions, but how can project auctions like Yuga Labs achieve trustlessness?
The first thing to explain is that the reason why the Ordinals team questioned this NFT auction is precisely because they believe that transactions conducted on Bitcoin should not have an intermediary agent asking for trust. However, in the future development of the Bitcoin ecosystem, the role of an intermediate coordinator will inevitably be needed. What we need to do is to achieve de-trust between the coordinator and participants as much as possible.
The above process can be regarded as the process of users participating in the NFT auction, and the conditions set are the NFT obtained by casting. As an agent, Yuga Labs cannot modify the transaction content submitted by users, but can only help users send funds to the target address set in advance. What PSBT solves in this process is how the user sends the entrusted transaction to the agent.
「This is Not What Bitcoin is Built For？」
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"This is Not What Ethereum is Built For!" This is Vitalik's evaluation of BAYC in an interview with Time Magazine in March 2022. Even in the flourishing Ethereum ecosystem, the development of NFT "IP giants" like Yuga Las is also not recognized by OG developers. When it comes to the Bitcoin ecosystem, this "resistance to industrial culture" seems to be even stronger, as evidenced by the fact that the Ordinals team bombarded Yuga Labs. Many Bitcoin OGs even completely denied the rationality of NFT's existence on the Bitcoin network, throwing out the statement "This is Not What Bitcoin is Built For".
As a Bitcoin enthusiast, A Jian gave his own opinion on this: People can't be blocked in any way they want to use the Bitcoin network, and the same is true for Bitcoin NFT. In the end, it is still up to everyone's Incentive to decide. "At least one very interesting thing about the emergence of Bitcoin NFT is that people could hardly buy anything other than Bitcoin on the Bitcoin network, but now it provides a way to use Bitcoin to buy directly on its network. Another thing, that's a big difference," said Ah Jian.
Regardless of whether Bitcoin NFT will flourish in the future, and whether it will be monopolized by "big IP companies" after development, the underlying technology supporting its development should receive more attention. Although in terms of technology itself, technologies such as PSBT and Sighash are not complicated to understand, and even not difficult to implement, they play an important role in the development of the Bitcoin ecosystem, as long as the transaction construction and signature are not in the same place occur, these technologies become very critical.
