Yuga Labs Kicks Off Auctions for Ordinal NFTs on Bitcoin
Why is the Ethereum nft giant releasing 288 ordinals on Bitcoin? How can you get one?
Last week, with a surprising announcement, Yuga Labs announced the release of TwelveFold, a limited collection of 300 generative pieces inscribed as ordinals on the Bitcoin blockchain. This will be a self-standing collection and will not have other utility related to the Ethereum-based Yuga projects.
The TwelveFold is a highly-rendered 3D image with hand-draws features, representing a visual allegory for data on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Below you can take a look at the creative process by the artist.
The auction will open on March 5th, 2023 at 3pm PT and close approximately 24 hours later on March 6th, 2023 at 3pm PT.
Why Ordinals?
According to the team, Yuga decided to build on Bitcoin since they “expect this technology and the ecosystem around it to evolve and become more sophisticated over time” but in a different way than “other blockchain NFT ecosystems have”.
For an introduction and overview of Ordinals, please refer to my previous article.
How to Participate in the Auction?
Being on the Bitcoin blockchain, this auction is slightly different from Ethereum-based ones.
The main difference is that users will need to have two Bitcoin addresses:
A wallet with enough Bitcoin balance to place a bid;
An EMPTY, self-custodian, BTC wallet Taproot-enabled, where you will receive the ordinal inscription in case of a winning bid.
There’s been some controversy around the bidding mechanisms.
In fact, in the Twelvefold terms of sale, a “Bid” is “a Bitcoin (BTC) transaction included in a block confirmed on the Bitcoin blockchain during the Auction Period where Bitcoin is transferred to a wallet address provided by Yuga Labs in connection with the sale of Yuga Inscriptions (each, and collectively, the "Yuga Wallet”)”.
What does this mean?
All user bids are temporarily sent to Yuga Wallet. As such, the auction is de facto centralized and relies on putting trust into Yuga that they will actually:
Send the Ordinals;
Refund all losing bids.
As Twitter User @veryordinally points out, this “established a really bad precedence”. Yuga is basically “taking custody of bidders’ bitcoin with a promise to send back unsuccessful bids”.
The Twelvefold ordinals will be awarded to the 288 highest successful bidders at the conclusion of the auction. You can check the current leaderboard below:
It will be interesting to see the final prices fetched by Twelvefold Ordinals.
Yuga is the biggest company to try this experiment yet, aside from Frank from DeGods speculating about releasing burned DeGods as Ordinals.
These efforts by bigger players may help establish Ordinals as blue-chips and the Bitcoin blockchain as the place for luxury NFTs.
I hope that different dynamics will be introduced, safeguarding decentralization, user safety and security.