The Bitcoin 
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trading app Oyl raised $3 million in pre-seed funding.
The venture firm Arca led the round. Additional support came from the Arthur Hayes’s Maelstrom Fund and Domo, creator of the BRC-20 token standard. BRC-20 is a Bitcoin-specific token standard enabling metadata to be minted on the smallest units of bitcoin, called satoshis. Bitcoin Ordinals are the non-fungible assets minted with associated metadata on the Bitcoin network.
Oyl is building a trading platform for the Bitcoin ecosystem, such as a market aggregation tool for BRC-20 tokens, in-wallet trading features for Bitcoin and integration with a Bitcoin-focused DeFi platform OmniSat. The platform, called Oyl Wallet, will launch in the coming weeks, according to a company release.
“Funds that have historically been focused on other chains are now seeing what’s possible on Bitcoin with Ordinals,” said Arthur Hayes in a statement. “The infra winners in ‘Bitcoin Defi’ are yet to be determined — it’s a huge opportunity.”
Bitcoin transactions have seen a rise in the past few months thanks in part to Bitcoin Ordinals. In November 2023, Bitcoin transaction costs surpassed that of Ethereum due to increased Bitcoin Ordinals trading volume, The Block previously reported.
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About Author
MK Manoylov has been a reporter for The Block since 2020 — joining just before bitcoin surpassed $20,000 for the first time. Since then, MK has written nearly 1,000 articles for the publication, covering any and all crypto news but with a penchant toward NFT, metaverse, web3 gaming, funding, crime, hack and crypto ecosystem stories. MK holds a graduate degree from New York University’s Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP) and has also covered health topics for WebMD and Insider. You can follow MK on X @MManoylov and on LinkedIn.