Bioniq launches marketplace for Bitcoin Ordinals

The Polychain Capital-backed startup Bioniq launched a marketplace for Ordinals on the Internet Computer Protocol ecosystem to reduce network load and lower fees.

In an interview with Cointelegraph the CEO and co-founder Bob Bodili said that the project had been in development since February 2023.

Bioniq offers a marketplace for auctions of Bitcoin Ordinals, tools for their generation, and a ready crosschain-wallet between Bitcoin and ICP.

If users create and store Ordinals in the Bioniq wallet, they can “wrap these assets by sending them to a Bitcoin address created using a smart contract,” Bodili explained.

Using ICP enables transactions in under two seconds, and provides zero gas fees. The architecture of the ecosystem also optimizes storage costs — on average about $5 per GB of data per year.

“There has yet to be a major platform or marketplace designed to support the Ordinals market on a standalone L1 without gas fees or a scalable network that could handle growth,” the project’s CEO said. “Although the new inscriptions movement will bring greater utility to the Bitcoin network, it could also lead to congestion and higher fees.”

The team highlighted significant growth in the number of BRC-20 tokens since their January 2023 creation. In total, more than 45 million Ordinals have been issued, and the volume of fees related to them has reached 3,196 BTC (~$120 million).

Earlier the average transaction fee on the Bitcoin mainnet surpassed the corresponding Ethereum metric amid renewed interest in Bitcoin inscriptions. The figure for Bitcoin rose to $12.75.

In November, the Fantom network’s daily transaction volume reached record highs amid growing popularity of Ordinals-like tokens of the FRC-20 standard.

Meanwhile, for similar reasons activity in the Avalanche C-Chain blockchain surged.