Binance has integrated Bitcoin ARC-20 atomical assets into its native Web3 wallet to provide a transparent, secure record of ownership and history for Bitcoin NFTs.
“ARC-20 is a token standard that makes it possible to create fungible tokens that can be held and transferred on the Bitcoin blockchain,” Binance employees wrote on May 2. “To celebrate this new integration, we’re offering zero-fee trading on ARC-20 tokens until June 2, 2024.”
The Atomicals protocol, developed in January and modeled after the ERC-20 standard used by Ethereum, facilitates the generation, transmission, and modification of nonfungible tokens (NFTs) on the Bitcoin blockchain.
“Even if an Atomical is updated or exchanges hands 10,000 times – that amounts to only about 2.5 MB of data (250 bytes x 10,000),” the Atomicals developers stated. “Any client, wallet, marketplace, game, and service can rapidly verify the Atomical by processing the history according to simple rules.”
Present applications of Bitcoin Atomicals extend far beyond NFTs and encompass web hosting, file storage, atomic exchanges, tokenizing real-world assets, decentralized social media, and numerous others.
In addition to Atomicals, the May 2 update for Binance Wallet adds support for BEVM, a Taproot-based decentralized Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible Bitcoin layer-two that executes smart contracts using BTC as gas fees.
This action follows other exchanges’ implementation of ARC-20 assets.
In February, Bitget, a cryptocurrency exchange, declared that its native self-custody wallet would support Bitcoin Atomicals. An analogous marketplace is exclusively reserved for Bitcoin Atomical assets on the cryptocurrency exchange OKX.
In the past year, Bitcoin has introduced innovations, including Ordinals, Inscriptions, Runes, and Atomicals, which have helped to rapidly close the technological gap between the network and the smart contract blockchains Ethereum (ETH) and Solana (SOL), despite concerns that it may become technologically outmoded.
Orders Exchange completed integration with the Bitcoin Runes protocol and built a Bitcoin asset bridge with MicroVisionChain that facilitates BRC-20 token swaps during the previous quarter. This integration enables the issuance of fungible tokens on the native network.
In contrast, the omnichain yield-generating protocol SolvBTC has amassed $700 million in total value locked (TVL) from Bitcoin minted on Arbitrum, Merlin, and BNB Smart Chain that carries a yield. The estimated annual return of the mechanism on user BTC deposits is 5–10%, according to the protocol.
