On Tuesday, Magic Eden, a multi-chain NFT marketplace, announced its support for BRC-20 tokens, expanding its offerings to include this token class built on Bitcoin. A spokesperson stated that BRC-20 support will be added at 8 am on Tuesday.
Magic Eden and the BRC-20 Move
This move not only enables users to buy and sell BRC-20 tokens on the secondary market, but also allows people to create their own new tokens on Bitcoin and traders to mint them directly via the launchpad. Magic Eden’s launchpad is offered as a premium service for content creators, providing marketing and strategy support.
Shortly after the launch of the Ordinals market in March, Magic Eden established itself as a leading venue for Bitcoin-based collections and took early steps to support NFT-like Ordinals amid growing excitement, capitalizing on its established name in a newly emerging field.
The inclusion of BRC-20 tokens represents a further push deeper into the frontier of assets built on Bitcoin. Magic Eden, originally a marketplace for NFTs on Solana, aims to maintain its newfound leadership by becoming an effective crypto token exchange atop an NFT marketplace.
Magic Eden’s co-founder and COO Zhuoxun Yin stated in an announcement:
This is another step at the beginning of our journey to build the best NFT platform for the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Currently, Magic Eden and crypto exchange OKX rank at the top in terms of transaction volume for Ordinal inscriptions, according to public blockchain data collected through the Dune dashboard over the past week.
Chris Akhavan, Magic Eden’s Bitcoin GM, stated that the marketplace would take a small transaction fee from BRC-20 transactions. Magic Eden will donate half of the fees related to new BRC-20 tokens offered via the launchpad to the Ordinals protocol team.
We believe it’s important to support creators, and the Ordinals team makes all of this possible. We have a strong belief in the permanence of building on Bitcoin.
Akhavan noted that over 40 different content creators have used Magic Eden’s Ordinals launchpad, with its “smooth user experience and broad reach” making it a “favorite among content creators.”
Ordinals and Bitcoin Connection
Ordinals, launched earlier this year by developer Casey Rodarmor, caught attention as a protocol that allows the creation of NFT-like assets on Bitcoin by “writing” data to individual satoshis, the smallest unit of Bitcoin.
These data could include images that Bitcoin users initially gravitated towards. However, after BRC-20 tokens’ introduction, spearheaded by Domo, a chain-internal data enthusiast known by the pseudonym inspired by Ethereum‘s ERC-20 tokens, text-based inscriptions used to create, swap, and mint BRC-20 tokens emerged.
A Dune dashboard shows that about 85,000 text-based inscriptions were made on Monday, compared to roughly 3,600 images processed to individual satoshis.
The interest in BRC-20 tokens has occasionally put significant pressure on the Bitcoin network. Last month, Bitcoin transaction fees soared amidst the rush of text-based inscriptions, sparking criticism from some Bitcoin users.
According to CoinGecko, the market value of BRC-20 tokens has reached $261 million since their launch, with the lion’s share coming from ORDI, the first BRC-20 token created by Domo, valued at $155 million.
ORDI peaked at $28.51 but has since dropped to $7.44 at the time of writing. In the past 24 hours, ORDI saw about $20 million in transaction volume.
