Magic Eden Launches Bitcoin NFTs Marketplace

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Magic Eden, a non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace, has created its own fully audited marketplace for Bitcoin Ordinals. 

The leading Solana NFT marketplace continues to expand across many chains with the inclusion of support for Ordinals assets.

A New Venture for Magic Eden

Magic Eden, the biggest Solana NFT marketplace, has revealed its support for Bitcoin Ordinals. The startup, valued at $1.6 billion as of June 2022, expanded to Ethereum and Polygon last year.

The new marketplace enables Bitcoin NFT traders to buy and sell Bitcoin Ordinal collections. This is similar to what Magic Eden provides for NFTs based on Polygon, Ethereum, and Solana. 

The firm explained that they want to transfer their experience in creating marketplaces to the young yet thriving Ordinals ecosystem, just like they have done with other chains.

Bitcoin NFTs have exploded over the past two months with the release of Ordinals. To date, more than 500,000 such inscriptions have been made. 

Ordinals are a relatively recent development for Bitcoin that allow for the on-chain storage of media without using smart contracts as on other chains. As a result, a lot of the infrastructure is currently being developed in real-time. 

Because of this and a lack of infrastructure, minting, handling, and trading Ordinals is more difficult than on networks like Ethereum and Solana.

This has made the field inaccessible and risky for nonprofessional users. Nonetheless, Magic Eden claims that the experience on the Ordinals marketplace will be comparable to what people are used to on its platform.

Magic Eden’s development of a Bitcoin marketplace could be a huge step forward because there are few tools and products for the blockchain’s trading market. 

Magic Eden will initially support the Hiro and Xverse wallets compatible with Ordinals as a non-custodial marketplace, never taking ownership of any assets being traded.

According to the company, this is the first fully certified Ordinals marketplace. For Magic Eden’s first beta launch of its Bitcoin Marketplace, it chose 13 collections to collaborate with, including Inscribed Pepes, Taproot Wizards, and Bitcoin Bandits, to name a few. 

A Bright Future for Ordinals

Magic Eden’s marketplace shows that the infrastructure and tooling for Ordinals are ramping up swiftly. 

Casey Rodarmor, a former Bitcoin core contributor, unveiled the new Ordinals protocol in January. Since then, Bitcoin Ordinals have soared in popularity.

Data from Dune Analytics shows that between February 1 and March 1, there were 240,000 more Bitcoin Ordinals inscriptions than there were on January 1. A total of 567,087 had been inscribed as of March 21.

When the Bitcoin NFT hype started to pick up steam in early February, some traders were coordinating asking prices and deals using public spreadsheets and Airtable forms because official marketplaces still hadn’t been formed.

Since then, two other Bitcoin Ordinals marketplaces, ORDX and Generative XYZ, which debuted in February, have already gone live. 

Earlier this week, NFT platform Gamma.io introduced its own Bitcoin Ordinals market, enabling users to produce and trade ordinal inscriptions in a similar way to Ethereum NFT marketplaces.

Magic Eden co-founder and COO Zhuoxun Yin claimed that the direction taken by Magic Eden’s Bitcoin marketplace would be influenced by the interests of producers. 

Although Ordinals are in their infancy, the protocol’s limits imply that some sorts of on-chain assets, like limited edition artwork, are more suited to it than others — such as extensive video game NFT collections.

However, Magic Eden has some future ideas already. The Ordinals market is currently focused on secondary market transactions, but the company plans to provide tools for creating digital assets and adding them to the Bitcoin blockchain.

It’s still unclear whether it will take the form of auctions or the minting launchpad it gives on platforms like Solana.









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Based in the UK, Jimmy is an economic researcher with outstanding hands-on and heads-on experience in Macroeconomic finance analysis, forecasting and planning. He has honed his skills having worked cross-continental as a finance analyst, which gives him inter-cultural experience. He currently has a strong passion for regulation and macroeconomic trends as it allows him peek under the global bonnet to see how the world works.