Last Updated on May 9, 2023 by Bitfinsider

In a bid to enter the buzzy Bitcoin-based industry, Binance, the most popular cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, revealed today that it will enable Ordinals inscriptions on its NFT marketplace later this month.

According to the business, an update to Binance’s NFT marketplace is anticipated to launch “in the coming weeks,” allowing users to buy and sell Ordinals inscriptions using their Binance accounts.

When certain NFT collections from Polygon were introduced to the platform in March, the NFT marketplace increased the number of supported networks. Mayur Kamat, the head of product at Binance, praised the inclusion of support for Bitcoin, the most valuable cryptocurrency by market cap, which was made available alongside NFTs on Ethereum and BNB Chain.

“Bitcoin is the OG of crypto,” he declared. “We think this is just the beginning, and we’re excited to see what the future holds for this area.”

During the initial rise in popularity of Ordinals, a number of inscriptions markets emerged, including Ordswap, Ordinals Market, and Ordinals Wallet. Additionally, Magic Eden, the biggest Solana NFT market, was the first of the established venues to enter the Ordinals market by announcing the establishment of an inscriptions market in March.

The NFT marketplace of Binance made the news just days after the exchange abruptly halted Bitcoin withdrawals and attributed the disruption to network congestion while its rivals continued to operate normally. The break occurred at a period when Bitcoin transaction costs were exorbitantly high and the network’s mempool, where transactions wait to be validated, had a significant backlog.

The general consensus on Crypto Twitter was that the network was being burdened by transactions involving BRC-20 tokens. BRC-20 tokens are coins produced on top of Bitcoin utilizing text-based rather than image-based inscriptions, and are traded using Ordinals, the same system that produces so-called Bitcoin NFTs.

BRC-20 tokens are not supported by the Bitcoin NFT marketplace on Binance at this time, Kamat added. These new, Bitcoin-based tokens and text-based inscriptions have mostly eclipsed image-based inscriptions during the past few weeks.

According to a Dune dashboard, 99.7% of the inscriptions sent through Ordinals on Sunday were text-based. Another Dune dashboard revealed that 65% of all Bitcoin transactions at the time involved BRC-20 tokens.

As soon as Ordi, the first BRC-20 token created as an experiment in March, was listed on the cryptocurrency exchanges Crypto.com and Gate.io, the excitement surrounding BRC-20 tokens reached a new level.