Ordinals Market Weekly Roundup (April 14th – 21st)
Mixed week in markets. Yuga Labs shuts down apes on 2 more Ordinals marketplaces! Another excellent marketplace aggregator.
Price action in the Ordinals market was mixed this week, with four Ordinals Wallet collections (Pixel Pepes, Planetary Ordinals, Clay Pepes and Pixel Mumus), being the big winners. The highest of these 4 by market cap, Pixel Pepes and Planetary Ordinals, were up 68% and 96% respectively since last Friday.
Bitcoin Apes was the biggest blue-chip loser, down 32.5% at the time of writing due to marketplace delistings (described below), while the smaller but similarly-delisted BIT APES collection only fell 5.5% on the week.
This data from WizOrd tells the tale of the tape, with weekly floor price charts offering the info at a glance.
Following a suggestion from Best in Slot‘s Binari, here’s a list of the top collections by weekly trading volume, as measured by PSBT (“Partially-Signed Bitcoin Transaction,” a trustless method for trading Ordinals or other assets) transactions:
Pixel Pepes with a commanding ~3.2 BTC lead! A single Cyber Pepe was sold for that 1.44 BTC.
Eagle-eyed readers will spot the insertion at #2. of the new Bitcoin Magazine Historic Covers collection,
which was introduced on Saturday the 15th – that additional data courtesy of Ordinal Hub.
BRC-20 Tokens
In terms of the new BRC-20 tokens, Ordi ramped from Wednesday to take pole position from Pepe. The combined market cap of this new sector currently stands at $12,658,951 (although market cap is a metric which must always be taken with salt in illiquid markets):
BRC-20 token data courtesy of BRC-20.io.
Ordinals Protocol
As for the overall Ordinals protocol, it’s growing from strength to strength. At the time of writing, approximately 10 hours before end-of-day, another 121,467 Inscriptions were added to Bitcoin’s blockchain since at the cost of another ~3.95 BTC ($110,840) in fees. As always, Dune has the helpful stats and visualizations:
As for the Ordinals marketplaces, Ordinals Wallet dominated sales and volume this week, but data from the last day or two shows that Magic Eden and Ordswap (and to a lesser extent, Gamma) are re-asserting themselves in terms of value traded:
Credit to Domo’s Dune dashboard.
Yuga Labs declares total war on Ape clones
Ordinals Wallet, currently the leading Ordinals marketplace by users and sales, dropped a bombshell on Twitter early this morning when they announced their delisting of Bitcoin Apes and BIT APES. This follows the takedown of those same collections by Ordinals Market on Tuesday. In both cases, Yuga Labs, the creators of the original Bored Ape Yacht Club collection on Ethereum forced the delisting with legal demands.
The “Kali” of Kali Yuga means “strife”, “discord”, “quarrel”, or “contention.”
One perspective on these events is that an ETH-based company is now using lawfare against the Bitcoin ecosystem. By going after relatively small players, despite an apparent lack of legitimate reasons to do so (1) (2), Yuga Labs seem determined to cast themselves as Wrightian villains. This approach risks damage to their reputation within Ordinals and escalating the intensity of competition between Ethereum NFTs and Bitcoin Ordinals. Indeed, some early efforts at tweaking Yuga’s tail have already been reported:
At any rate, it seems that Bitcoin Apes and BIT APES will be forced towards OTC trading and decentralized marketplaces. One interesting possibility is that such legally-vulnerable collections will begin trading over the forthcoming Civ Kit, a peer-to-peer marketplace based on uncensorable, permissionless NOSTR order-matching and Lightning Network transactions.
Another great Aggregator!
Finally, for those looking for another great Ordinals market aggregator, don’t make the same mistake as this author and overlook the excellent Ordinal Hub, which aggregates data from Gamma, Magic Eden, Ordinals Market, Ordinals Wallet and Ordswap.
Ordinal Hub offers both shorter and longer term views than either Best in Slot or WizOrd, with 6 hour, 30 day, 90 day, and all-time filtering options. Further features, such as a percentage value for listed to supply ratio of collections, are also helpful. It seems that Ordinal Hub tracks a total of 544 collections (to say nothing of individual Inscriptions), whereas WizOrd features 489 and Best in Slot has 970.
Interestingly, Ordinal Hub states the total volume for all its tracked collection stands at nearly $30m, or roughly 1068 BTC, which is significantly higher than the nearly $22m asserted by Domo’s Dune dashboard. As the dashboard tracks the same marketplaces plus Open Ordex, the $8m discrepancy remains a mystery for now…
Full Disclosure: apart from an Inscription listed for sale on Ordinals Wallet (for the lulz), the author holds no financial stake in any products or services mentioned above.
