Bitwise Bitcoin ETF wallet attracts inscriptions and rare sats donations

Asset management firm Bitwise made the Bitcoin address of its spot BTC exchange-traded fund (ETF) public on Jan. 24, becoming the first of the 10 spot BTC ETF issuers to do so. The Bitcoin wallet address has received multiple tips and donations within hours of being public, including some Bitcoin ordinals and rare sats.

The wallet address currently holds inscriptions donations worth $6,083 and holds a total of over 16,000 inscriptions . These inscriptions include two RSIC airdrops, one Bitcoin Punk, one Bitcoin Burials, one Quadkey, and several others. The account also holds thousands of BRC-20 inscriptions; however, there are no valid/active BRC-20 balances in the account .

Ordinals create Bitcoin-based nonfungible tokens (NFTs) by inscribing data such as images, videos, and more to an individual satoshi on the base Bitcoin blockchain. A satoshi is the smallest unit of Bitcoin, where 100,000,000 satoshis are in a single Bitcoin. Ordinals only came into existence last year but surprised the crypto community.

The popularity of Ordinals and inscriptions created two sides where, on the one hand, the pro-Ordinals community believes it makes Bitcoin network more fungible and versatile, while the other side believes Ordinal inscriptions often take up extra block space and congest the network.

While most of the crypto community lauded Bitwise’s move to make its ETF holdings address public, a few also pointed out the single 12,000 BTC transfer, suggesting the asset manager didn’t send any test transaction to verify the address.

Very cool. However, it would be nice to see at least one transaction spending FROM the address. Honestly kind of shocked they didn't test that before throwing ~12k BTC in there https://t.co/RpNqyWBs1T https://t.co/DtSC09D9rs pic.twitter.com/rKDSgTsWaf

— Alexander Leishman (@Leishman) January 24, 2024

Others questioned the asset manager for using a single key wallet instead of a multi seg one, which is considered more secure. A multisig wallet works like a bank's safe deposit box that requires multiple private keys to be used simultaneously to open it. Thus, with two or more private keys, a multisig wallet adds additional security to the crypto asset storage.

While the transparency is cool... WTF at putting half a billion dollars into a single pay-to-pubkey-hash address.

That's completely insane. Use multisig. And prove to the world that you're using multisig. https://t.co/ULCQUkIbCE

— Peter Todd/mempoolfullrbf=1 (@peterktodd) January 24, 2024

Cointelegraph reached out to BitWise to enquire about the company’s plan to support Ordinals and use single key over multiseg wallets but didn’t respond at publication time.