Magic Eden Launches Marketplace for Bitcoin Ordinals

Introduction

Magic Eden, the largest Solana NFT marketplace, has added support for Bitcoin Ordinals. It is the latest multi-chain move for the startup, which was valued at $1.6 billion as of June 2022.

What Are Ordinals?

"Bitcoin NFTs" have taken off over the last two months thanks to the launch of Ordinals, a protocol that lets people digitally imprint media and text on the original blockchain—with more than 500,000 such “inscriptions” made to date. Ordinals are a relatively new breakthrough for Bitcoin, enabling the on-chain storage of media without the use of smart contracts as on other chains, and much of the tooling is still being built in real-time.

Magic Eden's Ordinals Marketplace

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 that it is the first fully audited Ordinals marketplace. Even though minting, handling, and trading Ordinals is a more complicated process than on other chains like Ethereum and Solana because of the lack of infrastructure, Magic Eden says that its Ordinals marketplace experience will be similar to what users are used to experiencing on its platform.

Conclusion

Magic Eden's addition of support for Bitcoin Ordinals is part of its multi-chain expansion, having already expanded to Ethereum and Polygon last year.