Binance to bring Bitcoin NFTs to its marketplace through Ordinals Support

The leading cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, Binance, announced today that it will support Ordinals inscriptions on it NFT marketplace later this month, dipping its toes into the bustling Bitcoin-based market.

The update to Binance’s NFT marketplace is expected to roll out “in the coming weeks,” the company said, allowing users to buy and trade Ordinals inscriptions through their Binance accounts.

The NFT Marketplace extended its list of supported networks in March when it added certain NFT pools from Polygon to the platform. Offered alongside NFTs on Ethereum and BNB Chain, Binance chief product officer 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 think things are just getting started here and can’t wait to see what the future holds in this area.”

Several inscription marketplaces emerged amid Ordinal’s initial rise in popularity, such as 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, launch an enrollment marketplace in March.

The announcement from Binance’s NFT marketplace comes just days after the switch temporarily stopped Bitcoin withdrawalsand blames the blackout on the network while competitors remained fully operational. The break came at a time when Bitcoin transaction fees were sky-high and the network’s mempool – where transactions wait to be confirmed – was severely lagging.

The consensus on Crypto Twitter was that transactions related to BRC-20 tokens were weighing down 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 image-based inscriptions.

The current iteration of Binance’s Bitcoin NFT marketplace does not 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 the inscriptions made through Ordinal 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 a new gear on Monday when Ordi, the first BRC-20 token, was launched as a experiment in March, was listed on the cryptocurrency exchanges Crypto.com and Gate.io.