Magic Eden Launches Bitcoin Marketplace As Ordinal Inscriptions Continue To Grow

Magic Eden, one of the largest cross-chain NFT platforms, launched a Bitcoin marketplace for digital artifacts, the company shared on Tuesday.

“We are already a multi-chain platform and believe that adding Bitcoin will connect us to a deep community of people and a rapidly growing collectibles market thanks to Ordinals,” Zhuoxun Yin, COO and co-founder of Magic Eden, told TechCrunch. “Adding a Bitcoin marketplace allows us to continue our multi-chain vision.”

Ordinals, an NFT-like project on Bitcoin’s blockchain, has grown significantly since it was first entered in December. By mid-February, over 90,000 ordinals were entered — which is jargon for created (or minted) — on the Bitcoin blockchain. About a month later, there are more than 400,000 inscriptions on the Bitcoin blockchain, up 344% in that time frame, Magic Eden shared.

Prior to the announcement, Magic Eden supported NFT trading on Solana and Polygon and provided aggregate listings for Ethereum-based NFTs. Backed by major firms such as Paradigm, Sequoia, Coinbase Ventures, Solana Ventures and others, the platform has more than 22 million unique monthly visitors and over 100,000 wallets connecting to the network daily, the website said.

Magic Eden launching a Bitcoin marketplace could be a significant step forward because there are limited tools and products for the blockchain trading market, which has made the space inaccessible and unsafe for non-professional users. Going forward, this could extend its reach to a larger audience.

The launch will also integrate two non-custodial crypto wallets, Hiro and Xverse, allowing users to process transactions.

“The Bitcoin NFT ecosystem is very new and much of the tools that exist today are sub-optimal and lack robust security measures,” Yin said. “We want to come in with a serious focus on security and transparency while leveraging our brand so that people can feel safe shopping with their Ordinals, thereby opening up the ecosystem to flourish even more.”

As the overall NFT market continues to grow, the subsector continues to discover product-market fit, Yin believes. “The growth of Bitcoin NFTs indicates that there is a market for people who want to own real digital objects or collectibles.”

Magic Eden has “always taken a long-term view” that NFTs will be the center of culture for many years to come, Yin said.

While NFTs have gained popularity in the crypto industry, the mainstream world is still slow to adopt it, although major brands and companies such as Starbucks, Adidas and Nike have launched initiatives in the past year to implement NFT-like products and services .

For Magic Eden’s first beta launch of the Bitcoin Marketplace, it chose 13 collections to partner with, including Taproot Wizards, Inscribed Pepes, and Bitcoin Bandits, to name a few. These collections were chosen because they were some of the earliest to be enrolled and have the “strongest communities,” Yin said. “We see value in partnering with early adopters, as many of them have been pioneers of Ordinal Theory, as well as contributors to Bitcoin’s culture for many years.”

In the near future, all Bitcoin inscriptions will be available for trading on Magic Eden, Yin noted. In the long term, Magic Eden plans to continue developing new use cases on new chains.

“Despite where the market is, we’re continuing to build in the bear and we’re showing people that we’re doubling down on our commitment to the long-term potential of NFTs,” Yin added.