Ordinals Market Weekly Roundup (April 7th – 14th)
Ordinal markets and activity down into the weekend. Clay Pepes arrive! Ordinal Protocol concerns? Permanence down in Goblintown.
The Ordinals Market began the week on an optimistic note, Ordinals having passed the major milestone of 1 million inscriptions last weekend. The market-leading Binance exchange tweeted on this fact, signalling that major exchanges are paying attention to the Ordinals phenomenon:
@binance tweet from the 13th of April, perhaps Binance and other majors will launch Ordinals trading in future?
Total Inscriptions stood at over 1,1 million at the time of writing, according to analytics site, Dune. Total fees spent on inscriptions are currently at 174 BTC, worth around $5.3 million, after BTC’s price surged during the week to break and hold the key $30,000 level.
Despite such strong measures of market health, floor prices for most Ordinals collections slumped mid-week. It’s possible that the delisting on Tuesday of the Bitcoin Apes and BIT APES collection by the major marketplace, Magic Eden, started the slide. It’s since been confirmed that Magic Eden removed the collections for trading due to a legal notice from the creators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection, Yuga. This move may have led to worries regarding legal risk to other “community duplicates” of NFT collections.
The weekly percentage Floor Price change figures and the charts thereof, a new feature on market aggregator site, WizOrd, show top collections down for the week:
Data sorted by floor price, which is recovering on the daily timeframe for Pixel Pepes,
whose floor price was badly mauled during the week.
Welcome A New Marketplace
A new contender has entered the Ordinals fray! Welcome to Ordinals Finance, a new PSBT (Partially Signed Bitcoin Transactions; a safer and less-trusty way to trade) marketplace.
Speaking of marketplaces, here’s what their volumes look like at present, courtesy of @domo’s Dune dashboard:
Total Ordinals Volume (top left) is trending downwards since the mid-March peak, exciting new collections and fresh technical possibilities will likely bring in a fresh surge of user volume before long.
Transactions by Marketplace and Percentage Share (top and bottom right) show Ordinals Wallet has the bulk of sales. However, Percentage Share of Value Traded shows a more or less event split between Magic Eden and Ordinals Wallet, with Ordinals Market a distant third. It’s likely that the delisting of two popular Ape-related collections has impacted Magic Eden’s volumes.
Technical Issues
Meanwhile, a bug within the Ordinals protocol was much-debated this week. The bug caused 2,000 historical Inscriptions to go uncounted. Re-introducing them in their proper order would cause disruption and perhaps even loss of value for Inscriptions with a notable place in the ordering queue, so it appears consensus is tending towards another solution.
Advantages of Ordinals Immutability shown as Goblintown NFT artwork “vandalized” to protest royalties policy
Truth Labs, founders of the popular Goblintown collection on Ethereum, are unhappy about the royalties policies being implemented by several NFT marketplaces. In protest, they plan to move to a new contract without the controversial “feature” and issue identical NFTs to existing holders. They also changed their current artwork to the following protest image:
Whatever one’s outlook on royalties, from the digital art collector’s perspective it’s surely undesirable for assets to be alterable in this way. This is another clear example of how the change-resistant Ordinals platform offers some distinct advantage over competing NFTs. Udi Wertheimer provided further commentary.
Full Disclosure: the author holds no financial stake in any products or services mentioned above.
