On April 18, the Binance NFT marketplace will stop accepting deposits and transactions of Bitcoin Ordinals.

Only a few months after bringing Bitcoin BTC 66926 nonfungible tokens (NFTs) to its marketplace, Binance is phasing down support for them.

Binance announced plans “to streamline product offerings” in the Binance NFT marketplace in a blog post on April 4. On April 18, the exchange’s marketplace will no longer accept Bitcoin Ordinals for deposits or trades as part of these initiatives.

“Users are advised to withdraw their Bitcoin NFTs from the Binance NFT Marketplace via the Bitcoin network before 2024-05-18 00:00 (UTC).”

In addition, the Binance NFT marketplace will cease to offer airdrops, benefits, and utilities related to Bitcoin NFTs after April 10, 2024.

Bitcoin Ordinals, also known as Bitcoin NFTs, allow for the inscription of digital content like art, text, or video directly onto the Bitcoin blockchain. Data embedding has been part of the Bitcoin protocol for some time, but its popularity increased with the advent of ordinals in late 2022. This protocol, created by Casey Rodarmor, allows unique digital arts to be directly embedded into Bitcoin transactions, similar to Ethereum’s nonfungible tokens (NFTs).

Since the beginning of the Bitcoin network, a large number of NFT transactions have caused network congestion, which has increased fees and slowed down processing times as more transactions are validated on-chain.

Dune Analytics data shows that the network has earned over $423 million in transaction fees and over 64 million inscriptions to date.