Magic Eden’s new Bitcoin NFT Marketplace dominates the Ordinals Market

The growing hype surrounding Ordinals has established Bitcoin as a growing frontier for trading digital collectibles. And as the landscape evolves, Solana-based NFT the Magic Eden marketplace has quickly emerged as a new leader.

Ordinals – a protocol that allows content such as art and text to be entered into individual satoshis, the smallest unit of measurement that Bitcoin can be divided into – has exploded in popularity since its introduction in January as traders and developers become more familiar with NFT-like assets called inscriptions.

Magical Eden opened the door to trading listings just over a week ago on March 21, and has grown to represent a majority of Ordinal’s trading volume across various marketplaces that support them as of yesterday, according to a Dune dashboard created by a pseudonymous computer enthusiast on the chain named Domo.

On Tuesday, Magic Eden raised about $170,000 in subscription sales compared to about $72,000 on the second most popular marketplace, Ordinals Wallet.

BTC DeGods, A Collection of Inscriptions released of the creators of the most valuable Solana NFT profile picture (PFP) project, has played an influential role in Magic Eden’s rise to the top, Domo told Decrypt via Twitter message.

The Bitcoin-based collection of profile pictures has reached nearly 35 BTC, or almost $1 million worth of total trading volume since its release, with the cheapest inscription hovering around $23,000 worth of BTC at the time of writing, according to Magic Eden.

Magic Eden still lags behind Ordinals Wallet in terms of total daily transactions, although the trend over the past week suggests that Magic Eden is chipping away at this lead. Yesterday, 404 inscriptions were traded on Magic Eden while Ordinals Wallet facilitated 543 sales, according to Domo’s dashboard.

In other words, Magic Eden handles value-added Ordinals sales. And the long-standing link between DeGods and Magic Eden on Solana – even though DeGods is in the process of migrating from Solana to Ethereum – could translate to Bitcoin as traders flock to the well-known marketplace’s latest incarnation.

When Magic Eden launched in 2021, it started as a marketplace that exclusively supported NFTs created on Solana. However, over time the marketplace has added support for NFTs on other blockchains such as Ethereum and Polygon, the latter an Ethereum scaling network.

“We hope to continue to see both creator and user growth on Ordinals,” said Magic Eden Chief Marketing Officer Tiffany Huang Decrypt. “A lot of creators I talk to are definitely interested and exploring it, especially after knowing that valuable names like Yuga and DeGods are involved.”

For a user base already familiar with trading collectibles across multiple networks, Magic Eden merchants’ quick embrace of inscriptions on Bitcoin makes sense, according to Domo.

“Their user base is usually open to being multi-chain, so the prospect of a new chain is not scary for them,” Domo said Decrypt.

Magic Eden’s ability to turn the market for inscriptions quickly is also a function of its status as an established marketplace, compared to other trading venues that have emerged only recently and are limited to Bitcoin, Domo added.

At the same time, Magic Eden is only the first among mainstream marketplaces to support inscriptions. And as Magic Eden itself has experienced previously at Solana, even upstart rivals can eat quickly away from market dominance. But for now at least Magic Eden has the largest trading volume for Ordinals.