Ordinals Defy The NFT Market And Enjoy Best Day in Months

Nearly every Ordinals collection is enjoying some much-needed gains after months of downtrodden market activity.

Magic Eden, the NFT marketplace that hosts the majority of Ordinals collections, shows double-digit gains across the board. NodeMonkes doubled in price over the past two weeks and now has a floor price of 0.2 BTC or $13,000; Quantum Cats is up 10% to 0.28 BTC; Pizza Ninjas has spiked 18% to 0.165BTC.

Even Runestones, which was once touted to become the greatest memecoin community in Bitcoin but then suffered a precipitous drop, gained 18% today to trade for 0.0069 BTC. Only a handful of collections have dropped today.

Ordinals is a protocol invented in early 2023 by San Francisco Bitcoin developer, Casey Rodarmor to create NFT-like assets on top of Bitcoin. It uses a unique numbering scheme leveraging Bitcoin’s latest upgrade, Taproot, to inscribe arbitrary information to individual Bitcoin satoshis — the smallest decimal division of BTC.

They have taken the Bitcoin ecosystem by storm, ruffling feathers among Bitcoin maximalists while giving birth to a booming token ecosystem worth $759 million, according to CoinGecko.

The Ordinals resurgence comes after the segment took a backseat to Runes — a protocol for creating fungible Bitcoin tokens that took hold of the Bitcoin ecosystem after its launch in April. On Aug. 18, Runes accounted for 70% of Bitcoin’s on-chain transaction volume.

Ethereum and Solana NFT Leaders In The Red

By contrast, Ethereum’s top NFT collections are posting sluggish performances.

According to NFT Price FLoor, CryptoPunks is up 1.11% at a floor price of 28.5 ETH or $75,160, Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) is up 0.32% at 11.59 ETH or $30,565, and Pudgy Penguins is down 0.11% after last changing hands for 10.61 ETH or $27,982.

Top Solana NFTs are also posting modest gains.

Mad Lads is up 3.13% at nearly 50 SOL or $5,561; Galactic Geckos is up 3.25% at 14.78 SOL or $1,966; and Claynosaurs is down 2.63% after slumping 13% in two weeks to trade for 13 SOL or $1,966.