Yuga Twelvefold Bitcoin NFT Auction Raises $16.5M

Yuga Labs’ lively and controversial auction of the debut Bitcoin The NFT collection ended on Monday, with 288 successful bidders capturing an equal number of pieces in the limited series, spending a total of $16.49 million in BTC.

the collection, Twelvefoldreceived 3,246 total bids during the 24-hour auction, which began Sunday, according to a Yuga spokesperson. Of these, the highest bid was 7.1159 BTC, or approximately $159,500. The lowest successful bid was 2.2501 BTC, or just over $50,000.

The top 288 bidders will receive their inscriptions within the week, per Yuga. The final 12 pieces of the 300-count limited series will be held for contributors and distributed as part of Yuga’s philanthropic programs.

Yuga, the 4 billion dollar company behind dominant NFT collection Bored Ape Yacht Club, has only ever previously issued NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain. All other collections besides TwelveFold created or owned by Yuga – including Bored Ape Yacht Club, Mutant Ape Yacht Club, Otherside virtual plots of land, CryptoPunks and Meebits – also contained at least 10,000 NFTs.

TwelveFold NFTs are a marked departure from this work. They are generative works of art inscribed on the Bitcoin blockchain via Ordinalsa recently launched method of committing art to Bitcoin by permanently inscribing media on individual Satoshis, each representing 1/100,000,000 of a full Bitcoin (BTC).

The tiles are all 12×12 grids – a tribute to how data is stored on the Bitcoin blockchain – and are generative works of art that combine 3D graphics and hand-drawn features. Each of the 288 chips won at auction today will be generated by the same code, and chips won at a higher bid price will not appear qualitatively different from chips won at lower bid prices, according to Yuga. However, parts from the collection will be numbered and generated according to their ranking in the bidding process.

Earlier Monday, Yuga touched a little controversy with the way the company designed the TwelveFold bidding process. TwelveFold holders had to deposit the full bid amount directly with Yuga to be considered in the auction; Yuga promised that they would return rejected bids within 24 hours of the auction’s conclusion.

Casey Rodarmor, the creator of Bitcoin Ordinals, blamed Yuga for creating such a bidding process, claiming that it legitimized a process that could be easily manipulated by malicious project creators to steal funds from bidders.

“If I personally, Casey Rordamor, ever see you, Yuga Labs, the entity, screwing around with degenerate nonsense like this again, I will wash my hands of you forever and encourage others, including those close to me, to do the same,” Rodamor wrote on Twitter on Monday.

“Fuck you high-ranking idiots,” Rordamor signed the note.

The structure of TwelveFold’s bidding process reflects the current disconnect between the massive popularity of Bitcoin Ordinal NFTs and the lack of digital infrastructure that caters to the nascent medium. Despite only debuting at the end of January, over 325,000 ordinals have already been entered, according to data from Dune Analytics.

ONE report last week from Galaxy Research predicted that the Bitcoin NFT market will reach $4.5 billion by 2025. The same report predicted that a complete ecosystem of Bitcoin NFT-supporting products and services would emerge by summer.