Bitcoin NFTs cross $100m trading volume on Magic Eden in February

Bitcoin NFTs on Magic Eden have seen their best month yet for fees and trading volume amid sustained interest in the leading cryptocurrency from industry participants and Wall Street.

Magic Eden’s Bitcoin NFT market peaked this month with over $100 million in trading volume transacted by digital collectibles traders, per a Dune Analytics dashboard provided by pseudonymous contributor Sealaunch. 

The $2 million in fees paid for buying and selling Bitcoin NFTs on Magic Eden also set a record high on the platform. There were more than 45,000 buyers on the marketplace and over 91,000 sellers, but sales did not exceed figures set in December last year. 

The Magic Eden Bitcoin NFT market saw an uptrend in volume, fees, buys, and sales since September last year, when Bitcoin (BTC) exchanged hands for around $25,000 according to TradingView. BTC is up over 125% since then, trading above $57,000 for the first time since December 2021. 

A collection dubbed “Rare Pepes” is considered the first NFT collection on Bitcoin, although the term “non-fungible token” did not exist then. The effort predates the NFT hype that would later gather on crypto’s second-largest chain, Ethereum, in late 2019, following the successful Crypto Punks launch two years prior. 

Bitcoin NFTs made a comeback in 2023 with the introduction of ordinals and inscriptions, a method for adding data to BTC transactions. The technique was created by Casey Rodarmor in January last year and paved the way for renewed decentralized finance activity on crypto’s genesis blockchain.

While the standard inspired pseudonymous developer Domo to create the BRC-20 framework, unlocking a multi-billion dollar token ecosystem on Bitcoin, core contributors pushed back on the idea and tagged it a bug with the potential to threaten BTC’s chain.