📙Bitcoin Ordinals Guide

For those already familiar with Ethereum NFTs, transitioning to understand Bitcoin ordinals might seem daunting. However, with this guide, we aim to bridge that gap, providing you with the necessary tools, platforms and concepts to navigate and participate in the Bitcoin ordinals ecosystem confidently 👻

Understanding Ordinals and Bitcoin

Unlike Ethereum NFTs, which often have their content stored on centralized Servers, Bitcoin Ordinals directly embed data onto the Blockchain. This embedding ensures that each piece of data, image or artifact lives permanently on the Bitcoin Blockchain, making it immutable and secure. This approach contrasts with the Ethereum model, where NFTs typically point to data stored elsewhere, potentially susceptible to change or loss. However, Blockchain Space is limited, making huge or high resolution content on Bitcoin pretty expensive to inscribe!

While this Guide will show you a very simple and straightforward way to setup your wallet and mint Ordinals, we prepared lists of all important Links and famous people for you, too!

🔗Relevant Ordinal Links

Get started preparing and buying Ordinals

We choose the Xverse Wallet as this is the favorable wallet of the creator of this Guide and Magic Eden as it is pretty much considered the Marketplace with the most trading Volume related to Ordinals:

Step 1: Download Xverse

To start, download Xverse, available for Android, iOS and Chrome extension. For simplicity and to avoid any bugs with your Smartphone, we will focus on the Chrome extension. If you are a brand new user, you can select “Create New Wallet.” If you have an existing Bitcoin wallet, you can simply click on "Restore Wallet" and enter your seed phrase to restore your wallets.

Step 2: Back up your wallet

Xverse is a self-custodial wallet, meaning you have 100% control over your assets. It's crucial to securely backup your 12-word secret recovery phrase. You will need the phrase to restore your wallet if you switch devices or lose access to your current one. Writing down the phrase offline (ideally engraved on metal) and testing it for accuracy is highly recommended to prevent theft and storing it in a secure location such as a safety deposit box (or two!) is advisable.

Step 3: Fund your wallet

Select “Buy” to purchase BTC using Binance, Moonpay or Transak. Alternatively, you can send assets to Xverse. Click “Receive” to reveal your receive addresses. You will notice there are two different Receive addresses, one for Ordinals and one for Bitcoin. While the Bitcoin address is used to pay for transactionfees or buy Ordinals, the other address is purely made for receiving Ordinals. DO NOT send any Bitcoins to the Ordinals receive address!

Step 4: You are ready!

That's pretty much everything you need to be prepared. You can navigate to Gamma, connect your Xverse wallet by pressing "connect wallet" on the upper right corner and start discovering interesting Ordinal Collections (Freemints for example). You can also check out "Rare Sats" (historically significant Satoshis) but always keep in mind, that the transactionfees for buying Ordinals and Rare Sats heavily depend on the current activity on the Bitcoin Blockchain. With all the current hype, it may be smart to watch Mempool and wait for low transactionfees. The fees are calculated in Sat/vB, anything below 15-20 is considered pretty cheap at current levels.

If you have any Questions or Suggestions, feel free to join us on Discord ❤️ Link: discord.gg/499vXXGzrK