Bitcoin ordinal markets saw extreme activity on Tuesday after Binance announced support for native BRC-20 token ORDI.
According to the Dune dashboard created by anonymous on-chain data analyst Domo, as of this writing, Bitcoin Ordinals trading volume has surged to its highest level since May. At the time of writing, approximately $14.7 million in Bitcoin assets have been traded.
Launched earlier this year, Ordinals allows for the creation of NFT-like assets on the Bitcoin blockchain. The protocol allows users to assign data, whether it’s a work of art, a profile picture, or text, to a single satoshi (equivalent to 1/100,000,000 of a whole Bitcoin).
According to Domo’s dashboard data, the largest trading volume on Tuesday occurred on cryptocurrency exchange OKX. The Seychelles-based exchange has supported Ordinals trading since May, and as of this writing, Ordinals has seen 6,100 daily trades, accounting for 60% of total trading volume.
However, Domo’s dashboard does not record any recent activity from Binance. The leading cryptocurrency exchange initially launched support for image-based Ordinals in May, but only on Tuesday did it begin allowing users to trade the first-ever BRC-20 token, ORDI.
As of this writing, the bitcoin-based token has risen 124% in the past day to $13.21, more than double its initial price of $5.91 on Binance, according to the exchange’s website. Across all exchanges, ORDI has traded $471 million in the past day, according to Coingecko.
In addition to Bitcoin’s recent rally to $35,000 sparking renewed interest, Charlie Spears of bitcoin mining firm Luxor Technologies told Decrypt that Binance’s move to support ORDI “spiked everything related to Ordinals,” whether it’s fungible tokens or images.
“Binance alone dwarfs the volume of the entire Ordinals market,” he said. “You have the fungible token space of Ordinals, and then you have the NFT and JPEG space of Ordinals, which are often correlated to each other.”
The BRC-20 token was pioneered by the aforementioned Domo, which was inspired by Ethereum’s ERC-20 standard, which is widely used for a variety of tokens, including Tether’s USDT stablecoin. Domo first issued the BRC-20 token ORDI in March, initially as an experimental project.
Casey Rodarmor, founder of Ordinals, discussed Binance’s support for ORDI on Twitter and clarified the relationship between the token and the protocol. He pointed out that the exchange mistakenly referred to Domo’s token as “Ordinals” and mistakenly identified the link to Ordinals as the “official website” of ORDI, and further stated: “ORDI has nothing to do with the Ordinals project. I hope this misunderstanding can be clarified as soon as possible.”
The NFT market is also starting to show signs of life as Ordinals trading volume rises. Although the industry found itself in the spotlight during the NFT special on Sunday night’s episode of The Simpsons, NFT trading volume reached a three-month high the next day.
In May, Ordinals activity sparked concern among some Bitcoin enthusiasts as transaction fees for high-priority transactions rose to at least 654 sats/vB, or about $26. On Tuesday, high-priority transactions were priced at 98 sats/vB, or about $5, according to mempool.space.
Influential NFT companies like Yuga Labs, maker of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, have already used Ordinals to create artwork on Bitcoin, but the BRC-20 craze has further boosted the protocol in the first half of this year. Spears said Binance’s actions have further accelerated this trend.
He said: “We are seeing a gradual fading of the BRC-20 craze, which peaked in May and has weakened in August. But with BRC-20 listed on Binance, it will have a ripple effect on the broader Bitcoin NFT ecosystem.”