Yuga Labs has raked in US$16.5 million from its first-ever Bitcoin ordinal nonfungible token (NFT) auction that sold out in just 24 hours.
The Bored Ape Yacht Club creator unveiled the ‘TwelveFold’ collection comprising 300 generative pieces inscribed on Satoshis on the BTC network, attracting 288 bidders at the auction.
The highest bidder paid more than 7 BTC or US$161,000 worth of Satoshis for a single piece.
The TwelveFold collection inscribes each piece on a certain number of Satoshis, making them unique and valuable in the cryptocurrency world.
For the uninitiated, a Satoshi is the smallest unit of Bitcoin, with one Bitcoin consisting of 100 million Satoshis.
Visual allegory
According to Yuga, TwelveFold is a base 12 art system localised around a 12x12 grid, a visual allegory for the cartography of data on the Bitcoin blockchain.
The collection includes highly-rendered 3D elements as well as hand-drawn features which serve as a homage to the ordinal inscriptions currently done by hand.
The auction for TwelveFold has begun and will conclude on the block immediately prior to 3pm PT tomorrow, March 6th, 2023. Good luck.https://t.co/gvl8IHpekC pic.twitter.com/xGWU9jdCoO— Yuga Labs (@yugalabs) March 5, 2023
What is an ordinal NFT?
The launch of bitcoin improvement proposal (BIP) has introduced a method called ‘inscribing’ which allows creators to associate data to an individual satoshi and host metadata on-chain, effectively enabling satoshis to operate as if they are non-fungible.
This new development has led to the emergence of Bitcoin ordinal non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that offer the same principles of ownership, provenance, and self-custody that are associated with Ethereum NFTs.
An inscribed satoshi can be located by tracking when that satoshi was minted in time via the ordinal theory protocol, which is part of the BIP.