Bitcoin Runes Coming to Magic Eden After Ordinals Bet Pays Off

Cross-chain NFT market Magic Eden, which just lately jumped to the highest of the pack amid rising curiosity in Bitcoin Ordinals, introduced Friday that it plans to assist the upcoming Runes fungible token commonplace on Bitcoin.

“Ordinals, Rewards, Runes. The Way forward for BTC is on Magic Eden,” {the marketplace} tweeted together with a teaser video.

The Rune protocol is about to launch on Bitcoin’s mainnet following the halving, which is anticipated to happen on April 20. The halving is the quadrennial occasion baked into the Bitcoin protocol that cuts in half the BTC miners obtain for supporting the community. The transfer slows the increasing provide of Bitcoin, and usually additionally boosts the value of the asset.

Runes is a fungible token commonplace from Casey Rodarmor, the Bitcoin developer who created the Ordinals protocol for inscribing media on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Whereas fungible tokens have been out there on Bitcoin during the last yr through the experimental BRC-20 token commonplace created on prime of Ordinals, Runes is being pitched as a extra environment friendly manner of minting and buying and selling tokens on Bitcoin.

“We expect Runes goes to supercharge the Bitcoin ecosystem even additional, opening up a brand new wave of builders and asset sorts beforehand solely potential on different layer-1 chains,” Magic Eden co-founder and Chief Working Officer Z Yin advised Decrypt.

“We now have long-term conviction on native Bitcoin exercise,” he continued. “It’s a no-brainer for us to double down on this ecosystem by including Runes to our current Ordinals market, which has already hit $1 billion in quantity in 2024 alone.”

Earlier this yr, Magic Eden launched its Diamonds rewards program throughout all its supported chains, together with Bitcoin, Solana, Ethereum, and Polygon. The initiative offers NFT merchants point-like Diamonds, each for previous and ongoing trades, although it’s nonetheless unclear precisely how these Diamonds will profit customers.

Nonetheless, parallel to the Diamonds program, the Non-Fungible DAO—which Magic Eden says is run independently by an exterior crew—plans to launch a fungible token known as “NFT” that might be awarded to customers of sure open-source buying and selling and minting protocols. All such protocols revealed up to now have been created by Magic Eden.

Amid the Diamonds launch and NFT token teases, together with rising curiosity in Bitcoin-based belongings amid the main cryptocurrency’s current surge to all-time excessive costs, Magic Eden has shortly discovered recent footing to turn out to be the highest general NFT market by buying and selling quantity.

Decrypt reported in early March that Bitcoin Ordinals demand had pushed Magic Eden to the highest of the pile, with a 38% share of your complete NFT market’s quantity in a 24-hour span based mostly on public blockchain information curated by analytics platform Tiexo.

That hole has solely widened currently. Over the previous 24 hours, Tiexo experiences that Magic Eden is accountable for over 52% of whole buying and selling quantity throughout chains with about $35.6 million value—and Bitcoin Ordinals trades symbolize about 69% of that tally.

Thursday’s buzzy launch of the Ink challenge on Bitcoin Ordinals seems to comprise a big chunk of that quantity, with $18.8 million value of transaction quantity during the last 24 hours per the market’s information.

Over the past seven days, Magic Eden has remained on prime—however the Ethereum-centric market Blur has drawn nearer throughout that span. Magic Eden has about 35.7% market share throughout that interval, with Blur at about 32%. Tensor, which has lengthy been Magic Eden’s greatest rival on Solana and plans to debut its personal TNSR token quickly, has about 7.5% whole market share during the last week.

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.