A fully-audited marketplace for Ordinals NFTs is now available on Magic Eden. Through the popular platform, NFT traders will be able to list, buy and sell over 70 Ordinals collections, with Magic Eden also integrating support for Bitcoin wallets Hiro and Xverse.
Bitcoin NFTs reach Eden
“Ordinal digital artifacts exist on-chain, never off-chain, and are totally immutable, meaning they cannot be altered in any way,” said Magic Eden.
“Add the security aspect of BTC & the decentralization of its nodes, and you get the ultimate home for true digital collectibles.”
Ordinals has been quite the hit since it was introduced in January by Bitcoin core contributor Casey Rodarmor. The protocol effectively lets users ‘inscribe’ imagery, text and even video games onto individual satoshis, turning currency into NFTs.
According to Dune Analytics there have been 571,384 inscriptions as of March 22, equating to over 107 BTC ($3m) in fees.
Magic Eden, which was valued at $1.6bn last June, now supports trading of NFTs tokenized on the Bitcoin network, Solana, Polygon and Ethereum. The most popular Ordinals collection at the time of writing is BTC DeGods, with a floor price of 1.033 BTC. The collection previously lived on Solana and the public mint on Bitcoin sold out in just three minutes.
This BTC DeGod just sold for 3.52 BTC ($100,000). pic.twitter.com/RxkREokVFb
— Frank (@frankdegods) March 22, 2023
Instead of smart contracts, Magic Eden will facilitate permissionless swaps of Ordinals using partially signed Bitcoin transactions (PSBT) as the core technology. The platform also revealed that it will open source its PSBT signing library to help builders new to the space.
As for royalties, the marketplace acknowledged that “there is very little tooling and no secure and trustless enforcement solutions” in the current ecosystem. Consequently, Ordinals will launch with no royalty support for the time being.
The company confirmed it was “actively looking into the development of an on-chain, permissionless royalty standard” and is “committed to working with creators and the greater community.”
Magic Eden isn’t the only show in town: another NFT marketplace, Gamma.io, has launched its own trustless marketplace complete with a no-code creator launchpad and API infrastructure. In its March 20 press release, Gamma said it had already “assisted creators in producing over 30,000 inscriptions on Bitcoin.”
Other Ordinals marketplaces, such as ORDX and Generative XYZ, have spun up, give traders even more options to participate in the evolving BTC NFT ecosystem.
BTC NFTs: Good or bad for Bitcoin?
The arrival of BTC NFTs has caused some division in the Bitcoin community. While proponents argue that Ordinals brings more financial use-cases to Bitcoin and drives up demand for block space, others are uncomfortable about the financial degeneracy of NFT flipping arriving on the network.
One member of the latter camp is Bitcoin core developer and Blockstream CEO Adam Back, who referred to the “sheer waste and stupidity of an encoding” back in January.
Despite the polarization, Ordinals has been one of the most-talked about NFT projects of the year so far. And fears of skyrocketing transaction fees have proved somewhat unfounded – daily fees peaked in mid-February and haven’t come close to returning to those levels.
Although various media can be embedded in satoshis, including apps, videos, and audio, the vast majority of inscriptions thus far have been text or images, such as memes.
According to Magic Eden, its launch of an Ordinals marketplace “contributes to the culture of trust, security, and decentralization that is synonymous with the blockchain” and remains “true to the principles that underpin the technology.”
Don’t expect the arguments to die down anytime soon. In the meantime, coveted Ordinals NFTs will continue trading hands for appreciable sums. While it’s early days for the project, it shows no signs of slowing down.
and then