Thomas Tetherson

Ord io is shutting down on June 1. Three years ago, we launched our idea for "an Ordinals explorer with upvotes". We had no idea what was about to happen. Since then, Ord io has grown into a platform used by over a million people to explore inscriptions on Bitcoin. It brought us so much joy to ship features like Satributes for discovering the rare sats behind inscriptions and Block Vision for monitoring real-time Runes minting activity. Even simple filters and sorting options took on a life of their own. "Sort by largest inscription" quickly turned into a leaderboard where inscribers competed to create the biggest "four megger". And even the things that annoyed us at the time are funny to look back on now, like when the Bitcoin Puppets community would "raid" other collections so hard that we had to remove the downvote feature. To help preserve some of the Bitcoin culture that happened on Ord io, we'll be uploading the full history of upvotes, replies, and public address profiles to GitHub. That way, if someone wants to build their own Ordinals explorer with this context in the future, they can. Thank you to every single artist, collector, dev, and degen who joined us for this ride 🧡

When Gensler left the SEC in January 2025, Bitcoin was at 109k. Today Bitcoin is at 75k. One major reason the crypto markets have suffered is because market participants started to lose faith in the industry itself. After Gensler left, it essentially just opened the floodgates to the grifting age of crypto, where influencers and politicians were launching memecoins and rug-pulling their followers each and every day, without fear of any repercussions. This led to a massive misallocation of capital into useless assets that drained liquidity from the industry. While people celebrated Gensler leaving, it actually marked a turning point in the industry, with Bitcoin only marginally going higher before entering a bear market. Now that people celebrate Powell's removal as chair of the Federal Reserve, it makes me think history will repeat itself once again. People celebrate it in the short-term, but as we look back on this era in a few years, I imagine it will mark a major turning point in credibility at the Fed. If the Fed just becomes another cabinet of the executive branch, it may lead to a lack of trust in the institution itself. Perhaps many will look back in a few years and realize that markets were better off with Powell than without him.

It's a good day to be Australian 🇦🇺 We’re the first crypto exchange to secure an Australian Financial Services Licence with a retail derivatives authorization. We can now build the Everything Exchange down under. Crypto and equity perps first - options to follow!