The leading cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, Binance, announced today that it will support Ordinals inscriptions on its NFT marketplace later this month, dipping its toes into the buzzy Bitcoin-based market.
The update to Binance’s NFT marketplace is expected to roll out “in the coming weeks,” the company said, enabling users to purchase and trade Ordinals inscriptions via their Binance accounts.
The NFT marketplace expanded its roster of supported networks in March when it added certain NFT collections from Polygon to the platform. Offered alongside NFTs on Ethereum and BNB Chain, Binance’s Head of Product Mayur Kamat called support for Bitcoin—crypto’s largest 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 inscriptions marketplaces cropped up amid Ordinals’ initial surge in popularity, like Ordswap, Ordinals Market, and Ordinals Wallet. And Magic Eden, the largest Solana NFT marketplace, was the first among established venues to throw its hat into the Ordinals ring, launching an inscriptions marketplace in March.
The announcement from Binance’s NFT marketplace comes just days after the exchange temporarily paused Bitcoin withdrawals, blaming the outage on network congestion while its competitors remained fully operational. The pause 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 was that transactions related to BRC-20 tokens were weighing on the network. Built and traded using Ordinals, the same protocol that yields so-called Bitcoin NFTs, BRC-20 tokens are coins built on top of Bitcoin using text-based inscriptions as opposed to image-based inscriptions.
The current iteration of Binance's Bitcoin NFT marketplace doesn't support BRC-20 tokens, Kamat told Decrypt.
Over the past couple of weeks, image-based inscriptions have been largely overshadowed by these new, Bitcoin-based tokens and text-based inscriptions.
On 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 were related to BRC-20 tokens, according to another Dune dashboard.
The fervor surrounding BRC-20 tokens kicked into another gear Monday as Ordi, the first BRC-20 token launched as an experiment in March, was listed on the cryptocurrency exchanges Crypto.com and Gate.io.