Traders on Magic Eden marketplace will be able to purchase inscriptions, or NFTs minted on satoshis within the Bitcoin network. To help collectors, the company is integrating support for Bitcoin wallets Hiro and Xverse to allow traders to list, purchase and sell Ordinal NFTs.
Ordinals are a new breakthrough for Bitcoin, enabling the on-chain storage of media without the use of smart contracts unlike other chains, and much of the tooling is still being built in real time. However, accessibility and security regarding them still needs to be improved. At the moment Ordinals are growing fast and steady: there are more than 400,000 inscriptions (mints) on the Bitcoin blockchain, and this number has grown 344% in the past month.
For Magic Eden’s beta launch of its Bitcoin Marketplace, it selected 13 collections to partner with, including Taproot Wizards, Inscribed Pepes and Bitcoin Bandits, to name a few. Those collections were selected because they were some of the earliest to be inscribed and have the strongest communities. In the long term, Magic Eden plans to continue building out new use cases on new chains.
Magic Eden launching a Bitcoin marketplace could be a significant step forward because there are limited tools and products for the blockchain’s trading market, which has allowed space previously inaccessible and unsafe for nonprofessional users. Going forward, this could expand its reach to a bigger audience. We continue to observe.
