Magic Eden Launches Bitcoin Ordinals Marketplace

Nonfungible token (NFT) marketplace Magic Eden has launched its own “fully revised” marketplace for Bitcoin Ordinals, capitalizing on the growing interest in “Bitcoin NFTs.”

The newly launched marketplace allows Bitcoin (BTC) NFT traders to buy and sell Bitcoin Ordinal collections, giving users a similar experience it offers for Polygon, Ethereum and Solana-based NFTs.

“Just as we’ve expanded into other chains, we now aim to bring our expertise in building marketplaces to the nascent yet thriving Ordinals ecosystem,” the firm said in a March 21 statement.

The new Ordinals protocol was introduced in January 2023 by former Bitcoin core contributor Casey Rodarmor. Since then, the popularity of Bitcoin Ordinals has increased.

According to data from Dune analytics, the total number of Bitcoin Ordinals registrations increased between February 1 and March 1 from 679 to 240,000. As of March 21, a total of 567,087 have been registered.

“We closely followed the release of Ordinal Theory and the lightning pace of adoption that soon followed,” Magic Eden said, adding that it built the new marketplace in less than a month:

“Our marketplace was built over the course of a month, culminating in a hackathon in California with over a dozen developers.”

Currently, the marketplace only supports the secondary sale of Bitcoin Ordinals. The marketplace said it is also looking at future tools that will allow creators to more easily create or enter Bitcoin NFTs, such as the Launchpad it offers for other chains.

To enable permissionless exchanges, it uses Partially Signed Bitcoin Transactions (PSBT) – a Bitcoin standard that allows multiple parties to sign the same transaction – instead of smart contracts.

Meanwhile, Magic Eden says there will be no royalty support for the market, but said it is “actively looking” at this, adding that there is “very little tooling and no secure and trustless enforcement solutions.”

“With no royalty standard today, we have decided to launch on Bitcoin without royalty support for now,” Magic Eden said.

“We believe this is most in line with the ethos of the ecosystem, and despite this we are actively looking at the development of an on-chain, permission-free royalty standard and are committed to working with creators and the larger community,” it added.

Related: Bitcoin thought leaders weigh the pros and cons of Ordinals

Other Bitcoin Ordinals marketplaces have already launched, including ORDX and Generative XYZ which launched in February. Earlier this week, NFT platform Gamma.io unveiled its own Bitcoin Ordinals marketplace, which allows users to create and trade ordinals in a manner similar to Ethereum NFT marketplaces.

Cointelegraph reached out to Magic Eden for comment, but did not immediately receive a response.

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