Yuga Labs' Bitcoin NFT Collection Fetches Top Bid of Nearly $160K

Bored Ape Yacht Club parent company Yuga Labs closed its TwelveFold auction Monday, launching the company’s first Bitcoin-based non-fungible token (NFT) collection.

The 300-edition generative art project, which opened its auction on Sunday, awarded NFTs to the top 288 successful bidders at the conclusion of the auction at 6 p.m. ET. According to TwelveFold's website, Yuga Labs reserved 12 inscriptions for "contributors, future donations and philanthropic efforts."

According to Yuga Labs, there were 3,246 total bidders and the auction generated 735.7 BTC (about $16.5 million).

The 288 NFTs minted will be inscribed onto satoshis, the smallest denomination of bitcoin (BTC), on the Bitcoin blockchain. One token sold for as high as 7.1159 BTC, or about $159,600 at the time of writing, while the lowest accepted bid was 2.2501 BTC, or about $50,400. A directory of all TwelveFold ordinals will be published following the inscription process.

Successful buyers needed to supply a self-custodial wallet that contained bitcoin and an empty bitcoin address to receive the art.

Yuga Labs specified that the collection will not have any future utility or interact with any other of its Ethereum-based projects. Michael Figge, co-founder of NFT studio WENEW and its popular flagship NFT project 10KTF, was the artist behind the 3D project.

Figge said in a tweet thread the TwelveFold art was inspired by "the relationship between time, mathematics and the blockchain."

"Like crypto, the collection isn't so much linear but cyclical, with four different color palettes progressing throughout: winter, spring, summer, autumn. It's a nod to being optimistic whether we're in a Crypto Winter or a DeFi Summer," he explained.

Yuga Labs announced plans for the TwelveFold collection last week as its first foray into the Bitcoin-based Ordinals protocol. Many experts have pointed to the new phenomenon in the crypto space as a catalyst for bitcoin’s price jump.

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