Last Updated on March 7, 2023 by Bitfinsider

The Bitcoin Ordinals experiment by Yuga Labs attracted 288 successful offers, with one going for almost $160,000 for a single NFT.

Around 3 p.m. PT, the collection’s 24-hour auction, called TwelveFold, came to a close. Having previously ruled the market on Ethereum with the blockbuster collections Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks, this is Yuga Labs’ first foray into Bitcoin NFTs.

The highest offer was 7.1159 BTC, or approximately $159,600. The least expensive was 2.2501, or roughly $50,400.

“The TwelveFold auction has ended. Congratulations to the top 288 bidders – you will receive your inscription within one week,” according to tweets from Yuga Labs.

The Bitcoin blockchain’s satoshis are imprinted with Bitcoin NFTs using this minting technique. When a file, such as an artwork made for TwelveFold, is written (or inscribed) into satoshis, the smallest and most uniquely identifiable unit of Bitcoin, inscriptions, also known as digital artifacts, are produced.

Such NFTs merely go by the name “Ordinals,” and the process is made possible by the Ordinal Theory protocol.

Given previous Bitcoin blockchain updates that made it more affordable to store data in single transactions, ordinals have grown in prominence.

While Yuga will rejoice over another NFT sellout, some market observers were baffled by the auction’s format, which saw the firm take possession of bitcoin from bidders.

One Ordinal technical fellow commented on Twitter that Yuga was setting “REALLY bad precedence” by conducting such a sale. “They are taking custody of bidders’ bitcoin with a promise to send back unsuccessful bids. Not doubting they’ll do that, but this model is a scammer’s dream, and credible players need to set better example,” said the twitter user.

Others criticized the move as setting a “dangerous precedent” for a larger business in the industry.

In response to these critiques, Yuga expressed its excitement over Ordinals’ discovery of a permissionless technique for on-chain NFTs on the Bitcoin network.

Greg Solano, a co-founder of Yuga Labs, stated in an email that TwelveFold “was always intended to be an experiment” in the incredibly new field of digital publishing. On ordinals, where inscriptions trade over-the-counter on discord with bids recorded on Google spreadsheets and the existing marketplaces appear to be controlled by multi-sig escrows, many things we take for granted on Ethereum – like smart contracts and trustless transactions – don’t yet exist.

The hope is that TwelveFold can draw the builders to contribute to that, Solano concluded, adding that the business is thrilled to see new tools for trustless auctions and marketplaces.