The leading cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, Binance, announced today that it will support ordinals its inscriptions NFT market later this month, dipping its toes into the buzzy Bitcoin-based market.
The update to Binance’s NFT market is expected to launch “in the coming weeks,” the company said, allowing users to buy and sell Ordinal tokens through their Binance accounts.
The NFT market expanded the roster of supported networks in March when it added some NFT collections from Polygon to the platform. Offered alongside NFTs on Ethereum and BNB Chain, Binance Product Leader Mayur Kamat called support for Bitcoin—the largest crypto token by market cap—a notable addition.
“Bitcoin is the OG of crypto,” he said. “We believe things are just getting started here and can’t wait to see what the future holds in this space.”
Several subscription markets emerged amid the initial surge in popularity of Ordinals, such as Ordswap, Ordinals Market, and Ordinals Wallet. And Magic Eden, Solana’s largest NFT marketplace, is the first of the established venues to put its hat in the Ordinals ring, launching a market of inscriptions in March.
The announcement from Binance’s NFT market comes just a few days after the temporary exchange Stopped Bitcoin withdrawalswhich blamed the outage on network congestion while its competitors remained fully operational. The halt came at a time when Bitcoin transaction fees were sky-high and the network’s mempool—where transactions wait to be verified—was severely backlogged.
The consensus on Crypto Twitter is that transactions related to BRC-20 tokens are weighing on the network. Built and traded using Ordinals, the same protocol that powers so-called Bitcoin NFTs, BRC-20 tokens are coins built on top of Bitcoin using text-based inscriptions as opposed to text-based inscriptions. image.
The current iteration of Binance’s Bitcoin NFT market does not support BRC-20 tokens, Kamat said Decrypt.
Over the past two weeks, image-based inscriptions have been overshadowed by newer, Bitcoin-based tokens and text-based inscriptions.
As of Sunday, 99.7% of inscriptions made through Ordinals were text-based, according to a Dune dashboard. At the same time, 65% of all Bitcoin transactions are related to BRC-20 tokens, according to another Dune. dashboard.
The excitement surrounding BRC-20 tokens took another turn on Monday as Ordi, the first BRC-20 token launched as a experiment in March, that is listed of cryptocurrency exchanges Crypto.com and Gate.io.
