Context
Ordinals made individual satoshis collectible, and the tooling was months behind the demand. People needed one place to hold inscriptions, see them and trade them, without handing over their keys.
What was hard
- Bitcoin wasn’t built for any of this. Inscriptions, BRC-20, TAP and Runes each have their own indexing rules and edge cases, and they change as the community changes them.
- Non-custodial means the user signs. Every transfer and listing is built and signed on the user’s side, and it has to be exactly what they think they’re signing. One mistake can spend an inscription as an ordinary fee.
- A marketplace on a slow chain. The market has to stay fast and current while the chain underneath confirms slowly and occasionally reorganises.
What I did
I worked across the Next.js front end and the Node services: wallet flows, inscription viewing, transfers and marketplace trading. I added support for each new protocol as it took off.