Bitcoin NFTs Enter Binance Market With Ordinals Support – Cryptopolitan
Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, has announced plans to introduce Ordinals inscriptions support on its NFT marketplace in the coming weeks. This move marks the company’s entry into the rapidly growing Bitcoin-based NFT market.
Notable addition to the Binance NFT marketplace
The upcoming update will enable users to purchase and trade Ordinals inscriptions through their Binance accounts. In addition, the platform expanded its supported networks in March by adding select NFT collections from Polygon. Mayur Kamat, Binance’s Chief Product Officer, emphasized the importance of Bitcoin support, stating, “Bitcoin is the OG of crypto. We think things are just getting started here and can’t wait to see what the future holds in this space.”
Several marketplaces dedicated to Ordinals inscriptions, such as Ordswap, Ordinals Market, and Ordinals Wallet, have emerged following the protocol’s initial rise in popularity. Magic Eden, the leading Solana NFT marketplace, was the first established platform to support Ordinals by launching a subscription marketplace in March.
Binance’s announcement follows a recent temporary suspension of Bitcoin withdrawals on the exchange, attributed to network congestion. Competing platforms continued to operate without interruption during this time. High transaction fees and a severely lagging mempool characterized the Bitcoin network at the time.
The Role of BRC-20 Tokens
Many in the crypto community believed that BRC-20 tokens, built and traded using the same Ordinals protocol that underpins Bitcoin NFTs, were responsible for the network congestion. The BRC-20 tokens are created on top of Bitcoin using text-based inscriptions instead of image-based ones. Text-based inscriptions have recently gained prominence over image-based inscriptions, with 99.7% of Ordinals inscriptions being text-based on Sunday, according to a Dune dashboard. At the same time, 65% of all Bitcoin transactions were linked to BRC-20 tokens.
Interest in BRC-20 tokens increased when Ordi, the first BRC-20 token launched experimentally in March, was listed on cryptocurrency exchanges Crypto.com and Gate.io on Monday.
