Binance, the world’s leading cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, has announced plans to support Ordinals inscriptions on its NFT marketplace in the coming weeks, marking its entry into the thriving Bitcoin-based market. This update will enable Binance users to purchase and trade Ordinals inscriptions through their accounts.
In March, the NFT marketplace expanded its supported networks by incorporating select NFT collections from Polygon. With the addition of Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by market cap, Binance’s Head of Product Mayur Kamat considers this a significant milestone. Kamat remarked, “Bitcoin is the OG of crypto,” and expressed his excitement for the future of this space.
The recent surge in popularity of Ordinals has led to the emergence of multiple inscriptions marketplaces, including Ordswap, Ordinals Market, and Ordinals Wallet. Magic Eden, the largest Solana NFT marketplace, was the first established platform to enter the Ordinals market, launching its inscriptions marketplace in March.
Binance’s announcement comes shortly after the exchange temporarily halted Bitcoin withdrawals, citing network congestion as the reason, while its competitors remained fully operational. This suspension coincided with soaring Bitcoin transaction fees and a severely backlogged mempool. Crypto Twitter consensus attributed the congestion to transactions involving BRC-20 tokens, which are built and traded using Ordinals, the same protocol that generates Bitcoin NFTs.
While the current version of Binance’s Bitcoin NFT marketplace does not support BRC-20 tokens, image-based inscriptions have been largely overshadowed by the recent surge in interest surrounding these Bitcoin-based tokens and text-based inscriptions. Dune dashboard data revealed that on Sunday, 99.7% of Ordinals inscriptions were text-based, and 65% of all Bitcoin transactions were related to BRC-20 tokens.
The excitement around BRC-20 tokens intensified on Monday when Ordi, the first BRC-20 token launched as an experiment in March, was listed on cryptocurrency exchanges Crypto.com and Gate.io.
