In July 2023, with the halving less than a year away, Mohamad Abdulrazak used his slot at Mining Disrupt Miami 2023 to make a case that had little to do with hardware. Abdulrazak, head of marketing at ASIC Jungle, told the room that Bitcoin Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens were already paying miners, and that the fees they generate could help offset the cut in the block reward due the following year.
ASIC Jungle sells ASIC hardware for Bitcoin mining and offers hosting and mining consultancy, and it publishes a weekly article, ASIC Magazine. Because the company is "already known in the industry", he said, it chose a different subject for the session: what Ordinals and BRC-20 are, how they help mining rewards, and what they could mean for decentralized finance on Bitcoin.
A year of swings before the pitch
He opened with a look back. At the end of the previous year, he said, the network hashrate was approximately 248 exahash per second, while the bitcoin price had swung between $48,000 and $15,000, which left miners with thinner profits. In January, price and revenue rose against the month before. ASIC prices were at their lowest point, and he said miners used that window to add to their inventory and scale their operations.
Electricity costs were the other problem. Rising power prices pushed miners to look for alternatives, he said, and some moved hardware to Paraguay or to the Middle East, naming the UAE and Oman. Despite those hurdles, the bitcoin price peaked in the second quarter of 2023, up 70 percent and above $30,000.
What Ordinals add
Abdulrazak described Ordinals as a protocol that adds functionality to the Bitcoin blockchain. Bitcoin has traditionally been fungible: every coin a miner produces is identical and interchangeable. Ordinals introduce ordinal satoshis, which make it possible to create non-fungible tokens on Bitcoin. Information is attached to them, and he listed the kinds it can take: applications, audio, text or images.
He tied that to a larger theme of the talk, finding new sources of revenue, and to the idea of Bitcoin moving into tokenized assets and, later, smart contracts.
BRC-20 as a token experiment
BRC-20, in his description, is a token experiment that lets users mint and transfer fungible tokens on the Bitcoin blockchain using the Ordinals protocol. Existing bitcoin is turned into tokens that, once they are on chain, can be sold, bought, auctioned or traded. The process is called inscribing, and he said an inscription can be up to four megabytes in size. He was careful to say this is not a change to Bitcoin itself.
this does not alter the Bitcoin software but rather developers are using it in a different and Innovative way
Mohamad Abdulrazak · 4:03
He also walked through a rarity scale with six tiers: common, uncommon, rare, epic, legendary and mythic. Each tier is designated by a particular satoshi, such as the first satoshi of a block, of a difficulty adjustment period, of a cycle, or of the genesis block itself.
The numbers from July 10
To show the size of the market, he used figures from July 10, 2023. ORDI, the first BRC-20 token ever created, had a trading volume of approximately $11.16 million. Trading volume across all BRC-20 tokens was approximately $28.8 million, and he gave a market cap of $144.73 million alongside it. The total BRC-20 token market cap, he said, was approximately $1.2 billion.
these figures are immense as it holds a lot of potential for our industry as we just started this year
Mohamad Abdulrazak · 5:24
Does it pay miners?
Then he asked the question the room cared about most: does any of this benefit miners? His answer was yes. Each inscription is a transaction that has to be verified, and it carries a fee. By the day of the talk, he said, inscriptions had transferred over a thousand eight hundred bitcoin to miners, worth approximately $54 million at that day's price.
isn't that great for a [miner] that you're getting paid with a new Revenue stream for verifying tokens
Mohamad Abdulrazak · 6:09
The halving was his reason for caring. The block reward then stood at 6.25 BTC, he said, and it was set to be cut in half the following year. By embracing Ordinals and BRC-20, he argued, miners could see more transaction volume, higher fees and more profit, and Bitcoin could gain wider adoption along the way.
From inscriptions to DeFi on Bitcoin
The second half of the talk moved to smart contracts. He pointed to the Lightning Network bridging Bitcoin with decentralized applications, and to developers deploying utility protocols on layer two: stablecoins, decentralized exchanges, lending and borrowing protocols, liquidity providers, yield farming and liquid staking. That activity, he argued, would raise trading volume and market cap, and could push the bitcoin price well above where it stood that day.
He named the projects he saw doing that work. Mintlayer, a layer two built to bring DeFi projects to Bitcoin while inheriting its security model. Rootstock, a smart contract platform where developers build decentralized applications. Stacks, for decentralized applications and complex smart contracts. And the Liquid Network, a sidechain developed by the team at Blockstream for traders, institutional investors and exchanges, built for fast and private issuance and transfer of assets.
For anyone asking whether DeFi already existed on Bitcoin, he gave examples: ALEX, which he called the first Bitcoin DEX built on BRC-20; Stably and Money on Chain for stablecoins; Lava, at lava.xyz, for lending and borrowing; and Oshi, which he described as the first Bitcoin liquidity pool protocol.
Then and now
Abdulrazak closed by tying the pieces together. Non-fungible tokens, smart contract protocols and information attached to fractions of a bitcoin, he said, open new avenues for innovation and for mining rewards, and he encouraged the audience to explore them for themselves.
The halving he pointed to has since happened. His token volumes, market caps and fee totals are figures he gave from the stage that July, not current ones. When this session was recorded at Mining Disrupt Miami 2023 (July 25–27, 2023), bitcoin traded at $29,144; on October 15, 2026 it was $80,894.