Bitcoin Ordinals, the chain’s version of NFTs, has recently gained popularity, with over 150,000 inscriptions permanently written onto the Bitcoin blockchain. The demand for low inscription number tokens and collections has resulted in a thriving trading and auction scene. However, the process of interacting with the chain and obtaining an Ordinal has been opaque, sluggish, and centralized.
To address this issue, Web3 developers have introduced a number of user-friendly wallets and marketplaces for Bitcoin Ordinals. These include:
- Ordinals Wallet: Launched on February 16, this wallet explicitly supports Ordinal Inscriptions. It allows users to receive, store, and view Ordinals and will soon support transferring, sending, inscribing, buying, and selling of Ordinals.
- ORDSWAP Wallet: This trustless marketplace and wallet is the cheapest inscription minter available and can compress images, making it highly sought-after among Ordinals enthusiasts. It provides an easy and intuitive platform for users to engage with inscriptions and represents a significant step in the growth and expansion of the Ordinals project.
- Xverse Wallet: This Bitcoin Web3 wallet, which launched Ordinals service just 24 hours before Ordinals Wallet, offers 1st class support for Ordinals. It removes the need for users to run a full Bitcoin node to interact meaningfully with the blockchain. Users can simply pay a transaction fee in the wallet app and own some Bitcoin (BTC) to pay that transaction, which can also be purchased in-app using a fiat on-ramp service.
- Hiro Wallet: This wallet launched on February 14 with expansive support for Stacks-based NFTs and Ordinal inscriptions. Like Xverse, it uses Gamma to carry out the inscribing and deposits the Ordinals directly into a user’s account under a “Collectibles” section.
The increase in user-friendly ways to interact with the Bitcoin blockchain is indicative of the NFT community’s desire for the newly-found NFT ecosystem. More wallets, marketplaces, and user interfaces tailored to Bitcoin Ordinals are expected to appear in the coming weeks and months, as this entirely new section of Web3 continues to develop in real-time.