Ordinals Market Update for 12th April 2023: bearish day
Floor prices down across the board and it’s no Teddy bear’s Picnic, but why?
Update 2: selling has accelerated across most collections, with Pixel Pepes being the hardest hit of the majors, down 85% at the time of this update. The most likely explanation is that many paperhands decided to sell their Pixel Pepes after using them to claim the new Clay Pepes, which were made available for inscription today. A bounce must surely be coming but has not yet materialized and has indeed just materialized, with the floor price back to a far more comfortable 0.042 BTC on Ordinals Wallet. This chart from WizOrd tells the tale (sans the recent bounce):
Another possible explanation for the big move down is user error. WizOrd explains in the following tweet:
Update 1: following the Ape-related delistings, it appears that MagicEden‘s trading volume has fallen noticeably since yesterday. Ordinals Wallet, which listed BIT APES last night and still carries Bitcoin Apes, appears to be the major benefactor:
Despite Bitcoin’s bullish price action yesterday, which saw BTC smashing through and holding the psychologically-significant $30,000 level, the Bitcoin Ordinals market is bleeding today.
Bitcoin’s surge on Monday led to a break of $30,000 on Tuesday, this level is currently holding.
Chart courtesy of TradingView.
It’s likely that the Ordinals rout began with yesterday’s surprise delisting of Bitcoin Apes and BIT APES by Magic Eden at Yuga Lab’s legal “request.” This event may have shaken confidence in these fledgling markets, raising worries of other collections being delisted unexpectedly across the various Ordinals marketplaces. While decentralized over-the-counter trading is always a fallback for any collection, it’s currently a less convenient option which does slow down trading.
Currently it’s difficult to get a fully-customized view of Ordinals market data, so the following stats are combined from Best in Slot and WizOrd to show Price Floor changes and charts for top collections by weekly volume:
Note that the floor price for BIT APES shortly before the delisting was provided by market observers and used to calculate the percentage change until the time of publishing. As such, it may not be entirely accurate.
Bitcoin Apes was down the most on the day and the week as of this morning when the above stats were assembled. However, Apes has now been overtaken by the crash of Pixel Pepes, described above in Update 2. Unfortunately, the weekly data for BIT APES was not able to be sourced for this article.
Full Disclosure: the author holds no financial stake in any products or services mentioned above.
