NFT Marketplace Magic Eden Temporarily Halts Bitcoin BRC-20 Trade

Community-centric NFT marketplace Magic Eden recently announced its decision to temporarily halt Bitcoin BRC-20 trading best to “protect users until full ord consensus across all BRC-20”. However, as per an official post by Magic Eden on X, the short-term suspension of the Bitcoin BRC-20 trade will not affect other trading activities on the platform.

Magic Eden is one of the most popular NFT marketplaces built on the Solana blockchain. Launched on September 17, 2021, Magic Eden introduced a “fully audited” marketplace for Bitcoin Ordinals in March 2023. The press release stated,

“Magic Eden (“The Company”), the leading cross-chain NFT platform, today announced the launch of a Bitcoin marketplace for digital artifacts. As the only fully audited marketplace in the Bitcoin Ordinals ecosystem to date, it will feature an industry-leading user experience and interface that provides collectors with a familiar trading experience.”

With the Bitcoin marketplace’s launch, Magic Eden partnered with 13 prominent NFT collections, including Taproot Wizards, Inscribed Pepes, and Bitcoin Bandits. Bestowing a “Phantom-like experience” to users, the platform integrated two non-custodial wallets, Hiro and Xverse, at the time of launch.

However, while BRC-20 activity has dropped significantly, Magic Eden has decided to cease BRC-20 trading activities on the marketplace. Chinese reporter Colin Wu, on his official page on X, titled Wu Blockchain, shared a post on the latest updates on Magic Eden’s surprising move. He shared insights on the declining state of BRC-20, especially following the sats mint as well as the introduction of Rune, a potential alternative to BRC-20. He cited, “Since the finishing of sats mint, BRC-20 activity has dropped significantly, and the number of daily transactions accounts for less than 3% of the number of transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain.”