Yuga Labs’ First Bitcoin NFT Auction Nets $16.5M In 24 Hours
On Monday afternoon, Yuga Labs Inc., the company behind the top nonfungible token series Bored Ape Yacht Club, held a sale for its first bitcoin-based collection, dubbed “TwelveFold,” and garnered $16.5 million. The company has announced that 288 successful bidders would receive one of the Bitcoin NFTs from the inventory within one week, while failed bidders will have their initial investment returned to them within twenty-four hours.
Late in February, Yuga released a new art series called TwelveFold, which he called “a graphic allegory for the encryption of data on the bitcoin blockchain” and which was “inspired by bitcoin.” Three hundred pieces of the collection’s generative art were created with that motif in mind. Although while NFTs can be launched on the bitcoin blockchain, this is not a common practise. Since the introduction of the project in January, the number of NFTs uploaded to the bitcoin blockchain that make use of Ordinals images that are “inscribed” on the blockchain has increased dramatically.
In contrast to other NFT collections from Yuga Labs, TwelveFold is the first to be distributed via the bitcoin blockchain. Bored Apes Yacht Club, Mutant Ape Yacht Club, Otherside virtual land plots, Cryptopunks, and Meebits are just some of the company’s other NFT collections that have been released on the Ethereum blockchain. Each of the 288 Bitcoin Ordinals-based NFTs was auctioned off, with the highest bidder paying just over 7 BTC. Tokens representing non-fungible digital assets, such as works of art, songs, video game items, concert tickets, and other intangible or tangible goods, are known as non-fungible tokens (NFTs), a subset of crypto assets based on blockchain technology. Due to the fact that NFTs are exchanged on blockchains and stored in crypto wallets, they have a market value that can be purchased, sold, and traded for cryptocurrency.
After only 24 hours, the auction for Yuga Labs’ first collection of Bitcoin Ordinal nonfungible tokens brought in $16.5 million. By using “satoshis,” the smallest unit of bitcoin named after bitcoin’s anonymous developer, Satoshi Nakamoto, it is feasible to store photos on the blockchain. In total, 288 lucky bidders took home a piece of Bitcoin NFT art from the “TwelveFold” series. Yuga promised the inscriptions to the winners will be sent out within a week, and he promised to refund the money to the losers within 24 hours. In a late February announcement, Yuga called the collection a “base 12 art system centred on a 1212 grid, a visual allegory for the mapping of data on the Bitcoin blockchain.” Yuga employed a recently released mechanism for adding NFTs to the bitcoin blockchain called Ordinals, which required a custom protocol.
Debate arises about the bidding process during an auction.
Since all bids had to be sent in bitcoin to a single address that Yuga managed, the auction’s technique was received with scepticism from the cryptocurrency community. They said that those who won would get their NFT and those who didn’t would get their money back. The idea of handing over money to a firm in the event of failure and then having to wait for a reimbursement was unsettling to the community. There were only 300 of these available, and the sale started on Sunday and lasted for 24 hours. There were 3,246 bids in total, with 288 buyers spending a total of $16.49 million in BTC to win the auction. Bidding went as high as 7.1159 BTC, or about $159,500, and as low as 2.2501 BTC, or just over $50,000.
Twitter user “ordinally,” whose account is dedicated to the Ordinals, chimed in on the debate as well, calling the situation a “scammer’s fantasy” because the Ordinals were “taking custody of bidders’ bitcoin.” He continued by saying that he had no evidence to suggest that Yuga was acting fraudulently, but that this would be a poor model for future auctions.
