As always, so much is happening in the Ordinal space that I struggle to keep up. Here is a quick overview of some of the most exciting developments in the space from the last two weeks.
A New Challenger Enters
Some of the biggest news for Ordinals is the Polygon-based NFT marketplace Magic Eden has begun to support Ordinals. A well-known exchange supporting Ordinals will improve the experience of buying and selling them and bring them to a broader audience. Magic Eden has only supported Ordinals for a few days, but already it is beginning to capture a large portion of Ordinal volume. In the five days since Magic Eden has supported Ordinals, they have done $580K in volume. Although the volume is small compared to other NFT offerings, this volume amount accounts for around 4.39% of the total cumulative Ordinal volume of all exchanges. As this is still anyone’s market, and no marketplace is emerging as dominant, I expect other NFT marketplaces to follow Magic Eden here sooner rather than later.
The First BRC-20 Trade
An anonymous Twitter user, Domo, created the BRC-20 token standard for Bitcoin L1 a few weeks ago. These tokens are tied to sats and are still highly experimental – even if there are now thousands. However, this week the first ever BRC-20 <> Ordinal trade occurred. The exchange for 100K Pepe tokens for a PepesPixel Ordinal occurred OTC in their discord server. PepePixels have a floor price, so we can roughly put a price on the Pepe tokens. The PepePixel has a floor price of .0482BTC, which gives Pepe tokens a price of $.0136 and a market cap of $572K. I recommend users take these numbers with a massive grain of salt as the BRC-20 market is highly new, and users should exercise caution when interacting with them. But this is an exciting development nonetheless. Tokens on Bitcoin’s L1 could usher in a new economy and standard for projects building on top of Bitcoin.