Yuga Labs, the creators of the wildly popular Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), has completed the inaugural auction of its Bitcoin Ordinal non-fungible token (NFT) collection called “TwelveFold”, raising a staggering $16.5 million.
This comes hot on the heels after Yuga Labs faced a backlash from the crypto community over the auctioning process of its new Bitcoin NFT collection. The auction process is such that the bidders must send Bitcoin (BTC) to Yuga Labs’ address through one wallet. Simultaneously, they must keep another taproot-enabled self-custodied wallet empty to receive TwelveFold inscriptions.
Several users thronged to Twitter to express their dissatisfaction citing Yuga was establishing a “really bad precedent” for auctioning in the still nascent Bitcoin NFT space. Casey Rodarmor, the inventor of Ordinals, slammed the auction process, calling it a “degenerate activity” due to putting the participants’ Bitcoin (BTC) holdings at risk. Furthemore, NFT influencer Giancarlo criticized the process by saying,
so the way yugas auction will work tomorrow is everyone sends Bitcoin to one wallet and if you lose the bid they promise to manually send it back
likely tens of millions of dollars
we’re still in the stone age 💀
— Giancarlo (@GiancarloChaux) March 5, 2023
“We’re still in the Stone Age.”
Yuga Labs’ New NFT Collection Makes a Fiery Debut
The TwelveFold auction has ended. Congratulations to the top 288 bidders – you will receive your inscription within one week. Valid bids that did not rank in the top 288 will have their bid amount returned to their receiving address within 24 hours.
— Yuga Labs (@yugalabs) March 6, 2023
Despite the harsh critisizims, the auction became a blockbuster raising a massive $16.5 million in just 24 hours. Yuga took to Twitter to state that a total of 288 bidders have won one of the Bitcoin NFTs from the “TwelveFold” collection.
It reiterated noting the winners will receive their inscription within one week, while the unsuccessful bids will have their bid amount returned within 24 hours. The NFT collection garnered nearly 3,246 total bids during the 24-hour auction with the highest bidder paying over 7 BTC, approximately $161,000, for one of the pieces.
What are Ordinals?
Yuga Labs had announced TwelveFold on February 27 which comprises a limited edition collection of 300 generative pieces inscribed on Satoshis on the BTC network. The NFT giant described the NFT collection as a “base 12 art system localized around a 12×12 grid”, that will include highly-rendered 3D elements in addition to hand-drawn features, which will serve as an homage to existing Ordinal Inscriptions.
The TwelveFold collection is one of the first Ordinals collections after Rodarmor launched Bitcoin Ordinals on January 21. For the unversed, Ordinals are similar to NFTs. However, Ordinals are minted on Bitcoin instead of Ethereum and related networks, and they store all data on-chain instead of in a linked file. The Ordinals Protocol is a new technology that allows developers and artists to create and store digital artworks directly on the Bitcoin blockchain.
