NFTs have taken both the art world and crypto world by storm in the past few years. Ethereum has emerged as the clear frontrunner with Solana, Tezos, Polygon, Cardano, Stargaze/Cosmos, Near, Algorand, BSC, Aptos, Stacks and others all vying for a piece of the pie.

What seemed like a missed opportunity for Bitcoin, has now come full circle. As the leading cryptocurrency, the most decentralized blockchain, and the gold standard of digital money, Bitcoin has never been able to handle, nor did it seem to want to have NFTs on its blockchain. Although Stacks does cater to NFTs and its transactions settle to the Bitcoin network, it pretty much serves as an L2 to Bitcoin and has its own L1 network that runs in parallel.

However, through Ordinals, an entirely new world of possibility has now opened up.

Put simply, Ordinals allows for mostly pixel artwork or text to be inscribed directly onto a satoshi (the smallest unit of a bitcoin), thereby creating an on-chain digital artifact or “NFT” that cannot be changed — one that is immutable, secure, and scarce.

The creator of Ordinals has proposed the term ‘digital artifact’ as a better representation of the artwork that is inscribed onto satoshis, as suggested to him by ChatGPT — a distinctive term that highlights the differentiation between on-chain art and off-chain non-fungible tokens.

Most NFTs today living across various chains, are simply metadata and links to images stored off chain. A few projects like Nouns on Ethereum and Blockrons on Solana have managed to host their images directly on-chain but these are often rare and expensive endeavors. It cost Cryptopunks’ creators the equivalent of $73m in gas to integrate their entire collection on-chain.

Yet in-spite of that, the overwhelming uptake of Ordinals in such a short period of time has shown the desire, need and prudence of having artwork on-chain. Therefore what has emerged is the necessity to better differentiate the terminology of on-chain artifacts from off-chain NFTs.

The term ‘Dart’ is hereby proposed as nomenclature to better represent the class of object created via the process of inscribing or hosting artwork on-chain, on the bitcoin blockchain.

At first blush, ordinals or inscriptions may seem an appropriate name for this, however ordinals is a product that caters specifically to all types of inscriptions made to satoshis on the Bitcoin network, whereas inscription is being used as a term across many different chains to refer to inscribed content. Dart is an appropriate name for digital artifact artwork that was created on the bitcoin blockchain. The name stands for ‘digital artifact’ as well as ‘decentralized artwork’.

The case for Darts is solid — we are now ushering in a future where all digital art can be permanent, immutable, secure, and scarce by default.