Quick take:
- Magic Eden has launched a bitcoin NFT marketplace.
- The company sees this as a great move for its multichain vision.
- The announcement comes amid growing interest in Ordinals NFTs.
Magic Eden has launched a new NFT marketplace on Bitcoin. The Solana-based NFT platform is expanding its ecosystem to bitcoin amid the growing Ordinals Inscriptions. This announcement comes as the company continues to expand its multichain support system after expanding to Ethereum and Polygon blockchains last year.
Speaking to TechCrunch on Tuesday, Zhuoxun Yin, COO and co-founder of Magic Eden said: “We are already a multichain platform and believe that adding Bitcoin will connect us to a deep community of people and a rapidly growing collectibles market thanks to Ordinals.”
Yin added that adding a Bitcoin marketplace allows Magic Eden to continue its multichain vision.
Ordinals Inscriptions, the name given to digital collectibles and artwork inscribed (‘minted’) on the Bitcoin blockchain have become popular in the NFT marketplace since emerging towards the end of January 2023.
In mid-February, there were about 105,000 Ordinals Inscriptions on the Bitcoin blockchain. Since then, the number has soared to a whopping 400,000 amid rising interest. The platform has seen the likes of Yuga Labs, arguably the world’s biggest NFT project, join the Ordinals NFTs bandwagon with the TwelveFold NFT collection.
The Bored Ape Yacht Club creator generated more than $15 million after auctioning 288 pieces of digital artwork. The CryptoPunks NFT collection was among the earliest mega NFT projects to inscribe on Ordinals.
Last month, a developer also forked the Bitcoin Ordinals code to inscribe the first Litecoin NFT.
Magic Eden is the largest NFT marketplace on Solana, its integration with the Polygon gaming ecosystem allows it to support NFT offerings for games on one of the leading web3 gaming platforms.
Adding a Bitcoin marketplace allows the company to offer a variety of tooling to its rapidly growing audience. The launch includes the integration of two noncustodial crypto wallets, Hiro and Xverse, allowing users to process transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain.
“The Bitcoin NFT ecosystem is very new and a lot of the tooling that exists today is not optimal and lacks 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 when trading their Ordinals, thus opening up the ecosystem to flourish even more.”
Magic Eden has selected 13 collections for the beta launch of the Bitcoin Marketplace. Some of the collections featured include Taproot Wizards, Inscribed Pepes and Bitcoin Bandits, among others.
Yin said the collections were chosen based on the strength of their communities and the time they were inscribed.
We see value in partnering with early adopters as many of them have been pioneers for Ordinal theory as well as contributors to Bitcoin’s culture for many years,” added Yin.
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