Thanks to a digital art collection featuring the King of Rock and Roll engraved on Ordinals, Elvis Presley has made an appearance on Bitcoin.
In collaboration with inscription service OrdinalsBot, Bitcoin-focused intellectual property (IP) project Royalty created the 1,935 generating images in “Elvis Side $Btc,” which draws inspiration from the artwork of Joe Petruccio, an artist licensed by the Elvis Presley Estate.
By enabling data to be “inscribed” onto individual satoshis—the smallest unit of currency in bitcoin, valued at 1/100,000,000 of a full bitcoin—the Ordinals protocol enables each satoshi to have a unique value. They can be thought of as the Bitcoin equivalent of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which in 2021 made Ethereum-based digital art well known.
OrdinalsBot, a platform for minting the inscriptions, has emerged as one of the more influential projects in the Bitcoin development sector. It claims to be responsible for 80% of the 10 biggest files inscribed on the Bitcoin network, including the largest ever block, an inscription of the manifesto of privacy-focused tech stack Logos, which cost 3.5 BTC ($235,000).
Because these inscriptions are about 4 MB in size—the maximum size for a Bitcoin block—they are known as “four meggers.”
“We see it as being like acquiring a billboard in Times Square because of the visibility that it gives you within the Bitcoin network and that will last forever,” Ordinals co-founder Toby Lewis told CoinDesk in an interview.
(The new Elvis-themed series are more of the regular variety of inscriptions, not four meggers.)
Soon, Royalty will release a litepaper that will explain how a native token will be used to support the Elvis Legacy Council, a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) with the goal of “governing the future of Elvis’ digital legacy,” with 5% of primary and secondary sales revenue going toward this purpose.
