Magic Eden launches marketplace for Bitcoin Ordinals

It’s one of the first major NFT marketplaces to join the Bitcoin Ordinals fray, which as of March 21 boasted 567,087 inscriptions.

The Magic Eden marketplace for non-fungible tokens has now introduced a fully audited platform for trading Bitcoin Ordinals, taking advantage of the growing popularity of "Bitcoin NFTs." 

This latest offering enables Bitcoin NFT traders to purchase and sell their collections of Bitcoin Ordinals, providing a user experience that is similar to what Magic Eden already offers for NFTs based on Polygon, Ethereum, and Solana.

Zhuoxun Yin tweeted on March 21, 2023 “Extremely excited to announce that @MagicEden is now on Bitcoin. With this, we are simplifying the journey for collectors and creators to get started on Bitcoin - the granddaddy of all chains. Kudos to @kevcode_art @zhouzhuojie @ChartFuMonkey who championed this effort.”

“Just as we have expanded into other chains, we now aim to bring our expertise in building marketplaces to the nascent, yet flourishing Ordinals ecosystem,” the firm said in a March 21 statement.

The new Ordinals protocol was introduced in January by former Bitcoin core contributor Casey Rodarmor. Since then, the popularity of Bitcoin Ordinals has risen considerably.

According to data from Dune analytics, between Feb. 1 and March 1, the total number of Bitcoin Ordinals inscriptions surged from 679 to 240,000. As of March 21, a total of 567,087 have been inscribed.

“We paid close attention to the release of Ordinal Theory and the lightning pace of adoption that soon followed,” said Magic Eden, adding:

“Our marketplace was built within a month, culminating in a hackathon in California with over a dozen devs.”

At present, the marketplace exclusively facilitates the resale of Bitcoin Ordinals. However, it has expressed its interest in developing tools that would simplify the process of creating and minting Bitcoin NFTs, similar to the launchpad it currently provides for other blockchains.

To facilitate unrestricted exchanges, the platform employs partially signed Bitcoin transactions instead of smart contracts. This Bitcoin standard enables multiple parties to sign the same transaction.

Meanwhile, Magic Eden says while there will be no royalty support for the marketplace, it is “actively looking” into this, adding there is “very little tooling and no secure and trustless enforcement solutions.” 

“With no royalty standard today, we have decided to launch on Bitcoin without royalty support for now,” said Magic Eden.

“We believe that this is most in-line with the ethos of the ecosystem, and despite this, we are actively looking into the development of an on-chain, permissionless royalty standard and are committed to working with creators and the greater community,” it added.

There are already several marketplaces for Bitcoin Ordinals in operation, such as ORDX and Generative XYZ, both of which debuted in February. Gamma.io, an NFT platform, also recently revealed its own marketplace for Bitcoin Ordinals. This new marketplace enables users to produce and trade ordinal inscriptions in a similar way to Ethereum NFT marketplaces.