Magic Eden Launches Ordinals Marketplace for Bitcoin NFTs

“Bitcoin NFTs” has taken off in the last two months thanks to the launch of the Ordinals, a protocol that allows people to digitally imprint media and text onto the original blockchain – with more than 500,000 such “inscriptions” created to date. Now one of the leading NFT marketplaces on other chains have also made a move to support Bitcoin.

Magic Eden, the biggest Solana NFT marketplace, today announced that it has added support for Bitcoin Ordinals. It’s the latest multi-chain move for the startup — which was valued at $1.6 billion as of June 2022— after extending to Ethereum and Polygon last year.

Ordinals are a relatively new breakthrough for Bitcoin, enabling on-chain storage of media without the use of smart contracts as on other chains, and much of the tool is still being built in real-time. As a result, minting, handling and trading Ordinals is a more complicated process than on other chains such as Ethereum and Solana, thanks in part to the lack of infrastructure.

Still, Magic Eden says the experience of the Ordinals marketplace will be similar to what users are used to experiencing on the platform.

As a non-custodial marketplace, Magic Eden itself never takes control of assets being traded, and it will support the Ordinals-compatible Hiro and Xverse wallets at launch. Magic Eden claims it is the first fully revised Ordinals marketplace.

“The core marketplace functionality should feel very, very similar to users, and hopefully it gives people a sense that [Ordinals] obstacle is not crazy, said Magic Eden co-founder and COO Zhuoxun Yun. “As long as I have some Bitcoin in my wallet, I can just go ahead and it would feel the same as trying to buy something on ETH.”

Magic Eden’s marketplace launch suggests that Ordinal’s tools and infrastructure are spinning up quickly. As recently as early February, when the Bitcoin NFT buzz first heated up, there were some traders using public spreadsheets and Airtable forms to coordinate asking prices and trades, since formal marketplaces had still not been developed.

The first Bitcoin Ordinals marketplaces, including WORDX and Generativelaunched later in February, with others joining the fray since—including Gammaa marketplace first established for NFTs on stacks, a Bitcoin scaling network. Trustless marketplaces, including Magic Eden, are a big step up for Ordinals in terms of security, availability and scalability.

Yun said interest from creators will help dictate the future direction of Magic Eden’s Bitcoin marketplace. It’s still relatively early days for Ordinals, but even so, the limitations of the protocol suggest that it is better suited for some types of on-chain assets – such as limited-edition artwork – than others, such as large-scale NFT collections.

Nevertheless, Magic Eden already has some plans ahead. Right now, the Ordinals marketplace is focused on secondary market sales, but the firm plans to offer future tools for minting (or inscribing) digital assets on the Bitcoin blockchain. Yun said it remains unclear whether that will take the form of an embossing launch pad, which it offers on Solana and other platforms, or auctions.

Igor Milihram, who handles business development for Magic Eden, said the idea of ​​inscribing digital artifacts on Bitcoin lit a spark among the team, who “fell in love” with the idea of ​​Bitcoin NFTs. Having the artwork stored fully on-chain gives Ordinals a different value proposition than some other NFT chains as well.

“It stays on every node, forever,” he told me Decrypt. “Even if the apocalypse hits, there will be computers that want Bitcoin hard [drives], and they will be able to spin it up. It’s kind of indestructible that way. And that gives these assets more value.”