Magic Eden became the leading NFT marketplace of Solana ecosystem before expanding to Ethereum and Polygon. The newly launched marketplace allows NFT traders to buy and sell Bitcoin Ordinal collectibles, giving them the same experience provided for Polygon, Ethereum, and Solana-based NFTs.
“Just as we have expanded into other chains, we now aim to bring our expertise in building marketplaces to the nascent, yet flourishing Ordinals ecosystem,” the firm said in a March 21 statement.
The Ordinals protocol was first introduced in January 2023 by Casey Rodarmor, a core contributor to Bitcoin. Since then, the popularity of Bitcoin Ordinals has increased.
“We paid close attention to the release of Ordinal Theory and the lightning pace of adoption that soon followed,” said Magic Eden, adding it built the new marketplace in less than a month:
“Our marketplace was built within a month, culminating in a hackathon in California with over a dozen devs.”
Currently, the marketplace only supports secondary sales of Bitcoin Ordinals. Magic Eden said it is also looking at future tools that will allow creators to easily mint or inscribe Bitcoin NFTs, such as the Launchpad they made available to other chains.
To enable decentralized swaps, it uses Partially Signed Bitcoin Transactions (PSBT) — a Bitcoin standard that allows multiple parties to sign the same transaction — instead of smart contracts.
Meanwhile, Magic Eden said while there will be no royalty support for the marketplace, it is “actively looking” into this, adding there is “very little tooling and no secure and trustless enforcement solutions.”
Zhuoxun Yin, the co-founder of Magic Eden, said the company is trying to attract more users to Bitcoin NFT through its new product. This comes after trading platform NFT recently announced 15% layoffs in the last month.