Magic Eden Offers 50% Diamond Bonus For Buying NFTs or Ordinals

Ordinals and NFT collectors that use the Magic Eden mobile wallet app will now receive an additional 50% Diamond bonus along with earning ME tokens when purchasing their JPEGs.

“Now you can actually have something to show for all the time you spent on CT! (Your wife is still leaving you),” wrote the Magic Eden team on X on Sept. 10. “You can now earn $ME and a 50% Diamond Bonus when you buy NFTs or Ordinals on Magic Eden with ME Wallet’s mobile app.”

Magic Eden is a multichain NFT marketplace focusing strongly on Bitcoin Ordinals, Runes, and other NFTs. The platform recently added ME as its official ecosystem token, offering various incentives to users.

According to CoinGecko, spurred by Ordinals, Magic Eden became the top marketplace in 2024 by trading volume. With a 36.7% share and $122.47M in August trading volume, Magic Eden claimed its six straight month in the top spot, leaving Blur in the dust, with its market share dropping to 25% from 35%.

These numbers, which have OpenSea in a distant third with a 20% market share, come as a surprise considering the recent resurgence of Ethereum NFTs. CryptoPunks were up 35% last week.

Diamond bonuses are part of the incentives the company offers users. Using their so-called Loyalty-O-Meter, the company tracks how much a person buys, lists, or sells. When purchasing an NFT, a user will receive base Diamonds, which in certain cases – like when using the mobile app – can receive bonus rewards.

It does come down to your loyalty score, however. If a user has 100% Loyalty, they will receive a 100% bonus and an additional 50% for buying from an eligible collection with a temporary Diamond bonus.

Ordinals Down While Runes Dominate

Ordinals have remained in a lull since the fourth Bitcoin halving, which saw astronomical fees paid to inscribe images onto the block that experienced the block subsidy reduction.

Bitcoin Ordinals is a protocol standard invented by San Francisco-based developer Casey Rodarmor, who ingeniously took advantage of the Segwit Upgrade to allow for non-financial data to be inscribed onto the Bitcoin blockchain. They’ve been a cause of mighty contention among the Bitcoin community, with laser-eyed maximalists claiming it’s an attack on the network while others celebrate the renaissance it’s brought on.

However, Ordinals have been unable to regain the popularity they had earlier this year.

A Dune dashboard shows a clear downtrend in the volume transacted across all major Ordinals marketplaces. Not only are traders uninterested in the Ordinals space, but a Colombian telenovela is happening within the ecosystem after a former Ordinals founder dubbed rocktoshi stirred the pot trying to gain recognition for his participation in the early days of the protocol.

“If you want to know how bad Ordinals are, we're in the middle of the biggest drama of the year, and there hasn't been a single opportunistic speculation spaces in almost 24 hours,” tweeted the host of Bitcoin Season 2, Charlie Spears, on Sept. 6

Runes, however, continue on an upward trajectory. According to Ord.io, the Runes Protocol accounted for 75% of all Bitcoin transactions on Sept 9, and the yearly average sits at a whopping 35%.