Bitcoin Forum

Can we still push metadata onto the bitcoin blockchain and if yes, How do we do it and how fast will the ownership of a particular element get transferred from one person to another.

You mean using OP_RETURN to push certain data/words onto the blockchain? Other then that, i'm not sure how much is possible/what you're referring to here..
Coloured coins? Never heard of that before..

Anyway, here's the guide i found where you can apparently push certain words onto the blockchain ( although it being Hex), https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25224/what-is-a-step-by-step-way-to-insert-data-in-op-return/

Which looks quite interesting, but i doubt that this is what you're referring to.

It's generally considered something better suited to being built as a layer on top of Bitcoin, rather than cluttering up the main chain with it.  Plus, despite the fact it's perceived as a revolutionary concept, people aren't really as enthralled by the idea as you might like to think.  There's still a large amount of trust involved since someone is generally holding the physical assets these tokens are meant to represent.  You might have trustless transfer of the token, but it's more difficult to make guarantees for the underlying asset itself.  As such, it has a fairly niche existence at the moment, at least when it comes to BTC.  I'm sure there are about a bajillion projects for it in the ETH community, but they're most likely as fruitless as all the other ERC20 crapcoins.  There's also OMNI, which (last I heard anyways) is underpinned by BTC's blockchain.

If colored coins means OpenAssets in particular, I don't think so. I believe they use the 0x4F41 prefix, and there's nothing like that in opreturn.org's last 30 days graph, though I don't know how credible opreturn.org is. Omni appears to still be in use and, afaicr, accomplishes many of the same things.

Most people have stopped using colored coins because ERC20 tokens are so much cheaper to use and easier to handle. A while ago, STORJ was using a counterparty token but then switched to an ERC20 token because of how much easier/cheaper it was.

Isn't tether considered a coloured coin?
If not, what's the difference?

Because tether runs on bitcoin blockchain.

If that's considered a coloured coin, it's one of the biggest and most used altcoins.

Look into omnilayer. That's probably the biggest coloured coin provider on BTC - tether is an omni asset.

As mentioned by other posters, look into OMNI [1] (FKA Mastercoin) and XCP [2] (AKA Counterparty). I'm not sure how healthily maintained either project is though, as most tokens have moved onto the Ethereum blockchain.

The transfer speeds of colored coins should be the same as the transfer speed of regular bitcoins; at least so far I'm only aware of on-chain colored coin transactions on mainnet. Note that transaction size and thus transaction fees may differ from regular transactions.

[1] https://www.omnilayer.org/
[2] https://counterparty.io/

Tether has over $1B stored as coloured coins on BTC network.

Yeah, they are still in use.
Bisq (P2P exchange) should be releasing it's BSQ coloured coin soon.

If you need a coin to represent an asset, such as merit in some project, then coloured coins are better then building another blockchain just for that.
There is no need for everyone to run their own blockchain, we got Bitcoin, just use that.