Magic Eden, one of the largest cross-chain NFT platforms, launched a Bitcoin marketplace for digital artifacts, the company shared on Tuesday.
“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,” Zhuoxun Yin, COO and co-founder of Magic Eden, said to TechCrunch. “Adding a Bitcoin marketplace allows us to continue our multichain vision.”
Ordinals, an NFT-like project on Bitcoin’s blockchain, has grown significantly since the first one was inscribed in December. By mid-February, over 90,000 Ordinals were inscribed — which is jargon for created (or minted) — on the Bitcoin blockchain. About a month later, there are more than 400,000 inscriptions on the Bitcoin blockchain, up 344% during that time frame, Magic Eden shared.
Prior to the announcement, Magic Eden supported NFT trading on Solana and Polygon and provided aggregated listings for Ethereum-based NFTs. The platform is supported by major firms like Paradigm, Sequoia, Coinbase Ventures, Solana Ventures and others, and has more than 22 million unique monthly visitors and over 100,000 wallets connecting to its network daily, its website stated.
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 made the space inaccessible and unsafe for nonprofessional users. Going forward, this could expand its reach to a bigger audience.
The launch will also integrate two noncustodial crypto wallets, Hiro and Xverse, so users can process transactions.
“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.”
As the overall NFT market continues to grow, the subsector is still discovering its product-market fit, Yin thinks. “The growth of Bitcoin NFTs indicates that there’s a market for people who want to own true digital artifacts or collectibles.”
Magic Eden has “always taken a long-term view” that NFTs will be the center of culture over many years, Yin said.
While NFTs have gained popularity within the crypto industry, the mainstream world is still slow to adopt it, even though major brands and companies like Starbucks, Adidas and Nike have launched initiatives in the past year to implement NFT-like products and services.
For Magic Eden’s initial 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,” Yin said. “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.”
In the near future, all Bitcoin inscriptions will be available for trading on Magic Eden, Yin noted. In the long term, Magic Eden plans to continue building out new use cases on new chains.
“Despite where the market is at, we are continuing to build in the bear and we’re showing people that we are doubling down on our commitment to the long-term potential for NFTs,” Yin added.
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Jacquelyn Melinek