With Ordinals becoming more popular, one big question remains: which marketplace will people use?
Early Ordinal traders used spreadsheets, anon escrow agents, discord chats, and many other high-trust tools to buy and sell Ordinals. High-trust tools and anonymous escrow agents are not a scalable solution for Ordinals to take off. Ordinals desperately need a marketplace like Opensea.
Thankfully, crypto’s highly iterative and innovative teams have created the first marketplaces where trust-minimized Ordinal trading can occur. These marketplaces, Ordswap, Ordinals Wallet, Open Ordex, and Ordinals Market, are only a few weeks old but already have enough traction that we can begin analyzing their performance. It is too early to call winners, but we can look at the data to see if anyone is starting to take the lead.
Of the first Ordinal marketplaces, Ordinals Market is dominating the competition in terms of volume. As the market is still new, there is the potential for wash trading or even just a few large sales to skew the volume. We are not saying there is wash trading; the market is so new we must treat all data skeptically.
For example, when looking at volume data, we expect Ordinals Market to have the most transactions. Instead, Ordinals Wallet has dominated its competition regarding sheer transaction count. The transaction data is why we were skeptical of going purely off-volume data. The Ordinals markets are so new that a few big sales can drive up volume and change how the market appears.
Additionally, when we look at sheer users, we see that Ordinals Wallet has attracted the most users – really challenging the initial perspective that Ordinals Market was the marketplace leader.
These three charts show that the leading Ordinal marketplace spot is still up for grabs. However, trends are starting to emerge, like Ordinals Wallet leading growth in terms of users and transactions. But again, the market is so new that a new entry, collection, or even large incumbents like Opensea could change this picture drastically. Ordinal markets is a space I will be watching. Marketplaces will probably start competing for Ordinal volume using the whole range of incentives we have become accustomed to – tokens, fee reductions, etc. New marketplaces are exciting for Ordinals, and this large market is still up for grabs.
