Yuga Labs’ Bitcoin NFT collection earns $16.5 million in 24 hours

After running for 24 hours from March 5th to March 6th, the Yuga Labs auction for their inaugural Bitcoin NFT collection, Twelvefold, has concluded. The top 288 successful bids will receive their inscription in the coming days, while Yuga themselves will be pocketing 735.7 BTC (approximately $16.5 million). The remaining 12 inscriptions will be reserved by Yuga Labs for “contributors, future donations and philanthropic efforts.”

Twelvefold is an experimental 300-piece collection from Yuga Labs on the Bitcoin blockchain, made possible by the recently emergent Ordinals Protocol. On the Yuga Labs news site, co-founder Greg Solano describes Twelvefold as “a base 12 art system localized around a 12x12 grid, a visual allegory for the cartography of data on the Bitcoin blockchain.”

In short, it’s a generative art collection by the premier NFT company with a very limited supply. The collection includes highly-rendered 3D elements as well as hand-drawn features that act as a homage to the ordinal inscriptions currently done by hand.

“Our collection explores the relationship between time, mathematics, and variability,” says Solano.

The abstract art collection is a departure from the usual metaversal and avatar focus Yuga Labs is known for, but Solano acknowledges that the recent popularity behind Bitcoin Ordinals was something that the company wanted to get involved in.

"Stepping into the Ordinals Discord a month ago felt like getting a glimpse of the 2017-era Ethereum NFT ecosystem," says Solano.  "It’s the type of energy and excitement we love at Yuga."

However, Yuga’s Twelvefold auction did not come without its share of controversy. Due to the nascent infrastructure surrounding Bitcoin Ordinals, smart contracts and platforms like OpenSea that users might be accustomed to on Ethereum are currently non-existent. 
 

As a result, transactions are largely OTC and come with a number of different caveats. Yuga would have to manually reimburse the other 3,200 bidders who failed to place in the top 288. 
 

The winners themselves need to remember to receive their inscription on a fresh wallet, as mixing with other Bitcoin holdings can risk accidentally transferring the inscription in the normal course of using their Bitcoin.