Yuga Labs’ next NFT collection will be Bitcoin-based

Bored Ape Yacht Club’s parent company, Yuga Labs, is planning to release a new NFT collection on the Bitcoin-based Ordinals protocol. Called Twelvefold, it’ll be “a visual allegory for the cartography of data on the Bitcoin blockchain.”

Twelvefold is an original and experimental 300-piece generative art collection inscribed onto satoshis that will live on the Bitcoin blockchain. Yuga announced Twelvefold yesterday in a blog post, as well as on Twitter:

In the blog post, the company specified that the decision to release this NFT collection stems from its enthusiasm for the new technology — Ordinals protocol. While the idea of Bitcoin-based NFTs was and is considered controversial by some, as Bitcoin was intended as a blockchain with purely financial uses, some Ordinals collections are proving to be quite popular.

Related: Debates over Bitcoin NFT project

One NFT from the Ordinal Punks collection – Punk 94, which looks much like Yuga’s CryptoPunks, sold for 9.5 BTC or about $214,000.

Even though those Ordinals-based NFTs lack utility compared to Ethereum-based ones, Yuga is nevertheless excited about the protocol, adding:

The infrastructure and tooling around inscriptions (or NFTs) on Bitcoin is rapidly progressing, but is still incredibly nascent. Much of the foundational principles that we look for are here: provenance, self-custody, ownership – but the tooling and structure we’ve become accustomed to with Ethereum NFTs isn’t present.

Greg Solano, a co-founder of Yuga Labs, said:

All of these choices are a departure from what’s expected from Yuga. But, you know. F**k doing expected things.

We expect this technology and the ecosystem around it to evolve and become more sophisticated over time, however, we don’t expect it to evolve in the same ways other blockchain NFT ecosystems have.

We’re excited about ordinal inscriptions and what the future holds for digital artifacts on Bitcoin.

The TwelveFold auction will launch later this week. There will be a 24-hour notice with auction details and exact timing.