Bitcoin maximalists may not be too thrilled about this, but digital art fans are in for a treat. Yuga Labs, the $4 billion company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) collection, has announced their first Bitcoin-based NFT project, TwelveFold.
Set to debut later this week, the limited edition collection of 300 generative art pieces will all be inscribed to the Bitcoin blockchain, making the project one of the highest-profile launches of its kind via Ordinals—a new way of committing artwork and media to Bitcoin by permanently attaching each to an individual Satoshi.
This is an interesting development as every other project under the Yuga banner resides on the Ethereum blockchain, and they currently have 10,000 or more NFTs across eight projects. TwelveFold is also smaller in scale than usual, as it only consists of 300 pieces compared to a project like Autoglyphs, which has about 512 NFTs on Ethereum.
The pieces will all be twelve by twelve grids with 3D graphics and hand-drawn features. According to Yuga, this design signifies data stored to the Bitcoin blockchain, and there will be no connection between the project and their Ethereum-based IPs.
Yuga Labs said in a statement that “TwelveFold is an opportunity for us to explore, experiment, and set a foothold in the world of Bitcoin and digital scarcity. We are inventing our own path for digital art and self-expression on the blockchain.”
The announcement of the project comes amid a rapid rise in the popularity of NFTs and Ordinals, and according to Yuga Labs the auction already generated 735.7 BTC (about $16.5 million). The highest-selling token went for as much as 7.1159 BTC, or around $159,600 at the time of writing, while the lowest accepted bid was 2.2501 BTC, or around $50,400.
Yuga are inviting bidders to participate in the auction as long as they have a self-custodial wallet containing bitcoin and an empty bitcoin address to receive the art. An important stipulation is that the address must be empty, which mitigates the risk of the inscribed bitcoin being transferred in the course of normal bitcoin transactions.
Michael Figge, the designer behind the 3D project and NFT studio WENEW, described the project as “inspired by the relationship between time, mathematics and the blockchain” that cycles between “winter, spring, summer, autumn.”
It’s an eye-catching concept, and ultimately it serves as a great introduction to the newfound world of Bitcoin-based NFTs. Welcome to the Bored Ape Yacht Club’s Bitcoin-Inspired NFT Collection, the Crypto Cycle—where digital art meets mathematics meets the blockchain.
