History of Metaprotocols on Bitcoin | with Adam Krellenstein

Metaprotocols on Bitcoin have a long and complex history—stretching far before the launch of Ordinals, the most widely used metaprotocol in Bitcoin’s history.

Ordinals’ creator Casey Rodarmor credits much of his inspiration to these early projects—including Yoni Assia’s Colored Coins, Erik Voorhees Satoshi Dice, and of course, CounterParty (widely considered the first NFT protocol) developed by Evan Wagner and Adam Krellenstein.

While CounterParty was not originally intended for the use of on-chain art, its use for art developed a cult following—used by projects like RarePepes, which remain some of the most valuable NFTs on the market.

In this interview, I sit down with Krellenstein to review the full history of metaprotocols on Bitcoin—the complex history of the first NFT protocol in history—and why, after a long hiatus from Bitcoin, Krellenstein is back in action with metaprotocol Kontor …with the aim of giving all Layer 2s a run for their money.

In this episode, Adam and I cover:

- Why early Bitcoin metaprotocols (pre-Ethereum) didn’t take off for DeFi—and what's different today

- His personal experiences with Luke Dash jr and the early “spam wars” of 2014

- Why Adam left the Bitcoin space for 8+ years after the creation of Counterparty, and is making a dramatic return with Kontor this past year

- The rise of Pepes—and the pros and cons of frogs in pushing forward DeFi metaprotocols

- How Kontor is solving the 10-minute block time issue

- Why metaprotocols will ultimately outperform Layer 2s for Bitcoin DeFI 🌶️🌶️

This episode of Bitcoin Rails is powered by:

— Best In Slot - the leading API for Ordinals and BRC-20 data aggregation and indexing.

— Spark - a statechains implementation advancing Bitcoin-powered payments.

— Citrea - a leading Bitcoin rollup technology and BitVM alliance contributor.