Bitcoin Ordinals explorer Ord.io to shut down alongside trading app Zap

Bitcoin Ordinals browser Ord.io and its associated consumer app Zap will shut down on June 1, according to announcements published on X.

On Monday, Leonidas King, creator of Ord.io, cited financial constraints as the reason for shutting down the projects. "In the end we ran out of money and don't see a path forward," King wrote on X. Co-founder Zach Meyer also confirmed the wind-down on X.

Ord.io began in 2023 as an explorer for Bitcoin inscriptions with community features such as upvotes. It later expanded to include tools like "Satributes" for rare satoshis and Block Vision for real-time Runes minting data. King said more than 1 million people had used the platform.

"To help preserve some of the Bitcoin culture that happened on Ord.io, we'll be uploading the full history of upvotes, replies, and public address profiles to GitHub," Ord.io wrote. "That way, if someone wants to build their own Ordinals explorer with this context in the future, they can."

King also noted that the team is open to the idea of another entity taking over the platform and keeping it alive.

Meanwhile, Zap was a self-custodial app developed by the same entity designed to let users sign up, buy, and trade bitcoin memecoins in under 30 seconds. Zap wrote in its statement that while that 30-second goal was reached, the platform failed to attract enough traction.

The trading platform advised users to check into their accounts and export their private key to Phantom to maintain access to their assets. 

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Bitcoin Ordinals is a protocol that allows users to inscribe arbitrary data, such as images, text, or code, onto individual satoshis, the smallest unit of bitcoin. This effectively allowed users to form an NFT ecosystem directly on the Bitcoin blockchain, sparking massive traction.

Peak activity in 2023 saw millions of dollars in daily fees from Ordinals inscriptions, Dune data shows. Activity has since cooled significantly from those 2023 highs.