Binance to support Bitcoin NFTs by end of May
Bitcoin NFTs have grown in popularity since they were introduced in December. Photo illustration of Fortune
Since Bitcoin NFTs, or Ordinals, were introduced in December, some have hailed them as the next big thing for the new non-fungible token space – and a positive development for the Bitcoin network.
Others are not convinced.
On Tuesday, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world, Binance, supported Bitcoin NFTs by announcing that the Binance NFT marketplace would begin supporting the technology sometime in May.
“We believe things are just getting started here and look forward to seeing what the future holds in this space,” Binance’s chief product officer, Mayur Kamat, said in a statement.
Ordinals are similar to other NFTs in that they allow text, images, audio and other media to be tracked on the blockchain. But unlike other NFTs that can point to remote servers that store the media they represent, Ordinals exist fully on the blockchain, with the media “inscribed” directly on a Satoshi, the smallest denomination of a Bitcoin.
Binance also said it will make it easy for users to buy and sell a Bitcoin NFT “inscription” by allowing them to do so from their Binance accounts instead of a separate inscription-capable wallet.
Some Bitcoin supporters have said that Ordinals are a good way for the network to expand beyond purely financial use cases. Still, some on Crypto Twitter are not happy about the growing popularity of Bitcoin NFTs, citing network delays caused by the increase in transactions.
$BTC #blockchain struggling with huge amounts of transactions. After April’s update of BRC-20 on #Bitcoin Ordinals, many tokens were created and messed up the entire network.
Imo #BTC is too old and slow to be a competitor to the Ethereum ERC-20 network. 1/2 pic.twitter.com/M7gQtHauyy
— Crypto Sarah ®️ ( Beware Scammers ) (@sarahparker345) 8 May 2023
Binance joins rival NFT marketplace Magic Eden, which was one of the first mainstream marketplaces to support Ordinals and quickly became a destination. It had recorded nearly 2,300 transactions by midday Wednesday, according to a dashboard on Dune. The increased popularity of Ordinals comes as developers on other networks, including Solana, have challenged Ethereum’s dominance in NFT transactions with new projects and experiments such as xNFTs.
Bitcoin transactions have exploded on the network recently, boosted in part by Ordinals. In early May, the network recorded more than 680,000 daily transactions, the most ever. Fees to record a new transaction on the Bitcoin network have skyrocketed to $20 from just under $3 earlier this month, according to BitInfoCharts.
This is similar to Ethereum, where an increase in DeFi transactions or NFT trading can make the network fees very expensive.
Although ordinals are still a relatively niche use case for Bitcoin, we are already seeing their effect on the network, with expensive and slow transactions.— Niccolò Bardoscia (@NBardoscia) 9 May 2023
