Fresh off the news about one of its collections’ visuals being involved in an intellectual property claim, Bored Ape Yacht Club creator Yuga Labs has dropped a new “NFT” project: this time, it’s on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Dubbed as “TwelveFold” the limited edition collection is composed of 300 generative works inscribed on satoshis, right on the original Bitcoin blockchain.
“TwelveFold is a base 12 art system localized around a 12×12 grid, a visual allegory for the cartography of data on the Bitcoin blockchain. Satoshis are the smallest individually identifiable units of a Bitcoin. An inscribed satoshi can be located by tracking when that satoshi was minted in time via the Ordinal Theory protocol,” stated Yuga Labs.
Introducing TwelveFold. A limited edition collection of 300 generative pieces, inscribed on satoshis on the Bitcoin blockchain.https://t.co/aFWEIhzqcI pic.twitter.com/PjWABKKBr4
— Yuga Labs (@yugalabs) February 27, 2023
For those unfamiliar, non-fungible tokens on the Bitcoin blockchain are called Ordinals, which its creators and followers prefer to name as “digital artifacts” instead of NFTs. Ordinals are created with the idea of placing “inscriptions” on satoshis, which are the atomic composites of one Bitcoin. According to official documentation for the Ordinals project, the whole idea of inscribing sats (satoshis) with digital artifacts or perhaps any type of machine-readable language, persists with the immutable nature of Bitcoin itself. The Bitcoin Ordinals project was initiated by Casey Rodarmor, a blockchain dev who once worked with Chaincode Labs for Bitcoin Core.
“Digital artifacts are permissionless. An NFT which cannot be sold without paying a royalty is not permissionless, and thus not a digital artifact,” the project documentation says.
This means that Bitcoin Ordinals bear more difference than resemblance to how we have perceived NFTs to be. Of course, these nuances in terms of the political economy behind the creation of digital artifacts ensue and often become renewed points of contention between varying camps of the Bitcoin crowd.
“Stepping into the Ordinals Discord a month ago felt like getting a glimpse of the 2017-era Ethereum NFT ecosystem. It’s the type of energy and excitement we love,” Yuga Labs said.
The key difference here is with how NFTs and Bitcoin Ordinals relay the work at hand: while NFTs, in general, point to off-chain data for the IPFS (Interplanetary File System) coming from a base protocol for interoperability such as the Ethereum Virtual Machine, Bitcoin Ordinals do not require anything inscribed as such towards an off-chain destination. In this case, Bitcoin Ordinals represent a broader technical development over NFTs from within the same field or use case, addressing what was once an impasse in the Bitcoin blockchain.
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