Non-fungible token marketplace Magic Eden has launched its own "fully audited" Bitcoin Ordinals marketplace to capitalize on the surge in interest in "Bitcoin NFTs."
The newly launched marketplace allows Bitcoin (BTC) NFT traders to buy and sell the Bitcoin Ordinal series, offering users a similar experience to what Magic Eden offers for Polygon, Ethereum, and Solana-based NFTs. In a statement on March 21, the company said: "Just as we have expanded to other chains, our aim now is to bring our expertise in building markets to the nascent but thriving Ordinals ecosystem. "
The new Ordinals protocol was launched in January by former Bitcoin Core contributor Casey Rodarmor. Since then, the popularity of Bitcoin serial numbers has skyrocketed. According to Dune Analytics, the total number of Bitcoin Ordinals inscriptions surged from 679 to 240,000 between February 1 and March 1. As of March 21, a total of 567,087 registrations have been made. "We've been following Ordinal Theory's launch closely and the resulting lightning-fast adoption," said Magic Eden, adding:
“Our marketplace was built in a month, culminating in a hackathon with a dozen developers in California.” Currently, the marketplace only supports secondary sales of Bitcoin Ordinals. The marketplace said it is also working on future tools that would allow creators to more easily mint or inscribe bitcoin NFTs, such as the launchpad it offers for other chains. To enable permissionless exchanges, it uses partially signed bitcoin transactions a bitcoin standard that allows multiple parties to sign the same transaction instead of smart contracts. Meanwhile, Magic Eden said that while the marketplace will not offer royalty support, it is "actively researching" this, adding that "there are few tools and no secure and trustless law enforcement solutions."
“Since there is no royalty standard today, we decided to launch Bitcoin without royalty support,” Magic Eden said. “We believe this is best in the spirit of the ecosystem, nonetheless we are actively investigating the development of an on-chain, permissionless royalty standard and are committed to working with creators and the larger community,” it added. Other Bitcoin Ordinals marketplaces have launched, including ORDX and Generative XYZ, which launched in February. Earlier this week, NFT platform Gamma.io launched its own Bitcoin serial number marketplace, allowing users to create and trade serial number inscriptions in a manner similar to Ethereum’s NFT marketplace.
