Bored Ape owner burns $169K NFT to move it from Ethereum to Bitcoin

A valuable digital collectible was permanently removed from circulation over the weekend as its owner aimed to symbolically move the asset’s underlying blockchain from Ethereum to Bitcoin.

The collectible was Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) #1626, an Ape from the most valuable project in the NFT space. The last sale on OpenSea took place last November when it sold for 108 Ethereum– it is nearly $432,000 at the time of transactionor about $169,000 at today’s prices.

NFTs are digital assets that are provably unique and indicate the ownership of an object, often digital art. Ownership of BAYC #1626 is tied to a digital token registered on the Ethereum network, where it can also be traded – that is, until recently.

Digital tokens can be permanently removed from circulation through a process called burning, which involves sending an asset to a location where it cannot be retrieved. Jason Williams claimed to have burned BAYC #1626 over the weekend, preventing it from being sold again, at least on Ethereum’s network.

“Essentially throwing a Lamborghini into a garbage compactor — that’s kind of fun,” Williams shared Decrypt. “Whether or not it’s smart to put bloated JPEGs on Bitcoin’s base chain is a whole ‘nother debate, but I think it’s going to be a lot of fun to see how it plays out.”

Williams believes that his Monkey now exists on Bitcoin. That is because the location that BAYC #1626 was burned to is linked to an inscription made through Ordinals. Created by Casey Rodarmor, Ordinals is a project that allows content such as videos and images to be assigned individual satoshis – the smallest unit that Bitcoin can be divided into – where they permanently exist on Bitcoin’s network as Inscriptions.

Although the number of Bitcoin inscriptions is approaching 100,000, there are few notable marketplaces for people to trade them, and a significant number of buyers and sellers are currently connected through Ordinal’s discord server.

The burning took place using a newly developed feature for Ordinals called Teleburn, which creates a unique location with each new inscription to which digital assets can be burned. The feature allows users to assign an existing asset from another network to a Bitcoin inscription while removing it from circulation, effectively transferring the token between chains in the eyes of those who created the new feature.

“The idea is that you’re one-way, permanently burning an asset on another chain and pointing it to the ordinal that lives on the Bitcoin chain,” said William Hamilton, who partnered with Rodarmor to create the new Ordinals feature.

Hamilton approached Rodarmor about developing the Teleburn feature last Saturday at Bitcoin Park, a co-working space in Nashville, Tennessee that caters to the Bitcoin community. The two decided to work together after Hamilton pointed out that Williams wanted to burn his monkey, who had responded to one of Rodarmor’s Tweets.

“Let’s write some code right now,” Rodarmor said, according to Hamilton, adding that the prospect of burning a monkey made Rodarmor “really excited.”

Rodarmar did not respond to requests for comment from Decrypt. However, the two can be seen developing Ordinal’s Teleburn feature in a recent Tweet, according to Hamilton.

Burning BAYC #1626 was not the first time Ordinal’s Teleburn feature was used. Rodarmor first tested the new feature on an ENS domain he owned, rodarmor.eth. The pair then supervised Williams as he burned the monkey.

The term Teleburn was coined by Rodarmor, as a combination of the words teleport and burn, Hamilton said. Rodarmor referenced the feature’s rushed development with Hamilton in a recent tweet.

Hamilton believes the Teleburn feature will catch on as a way for people to bridge their digital collectibles, noting that Rodarmor plans to expand Ordinal’s Teleburn support to assets on chains other than Ethereum, such as Tezos and Solana.

“This has now set the standard for representing an asset throughout the chain,” Hamilton said. “It’s going to be the way to actually have skin in the game,” pointing out that assets that are burned are permanently out of circulation.

A chimpanzee off the old block?

As news of the Bored Ape burn spread on Twitter on Monday, Yuga Labs co-founder Greg Solano weighed in, saying that the inscription associated with BAYC #1626 is an unlicensed reproduction of the original NFT because Williams no longer holds Ethereum’s Network.

“If you transfer your monkey to an address you no longer control (even if it’s the ‘burn’ address), you’ve effectively given up your license,” he said.

Solano also pushed back against the notion that BAYC #1626 is “gone from [Ethereum] forever,” as mentioned in the post’s first tweet, because it still exists on the chain, even though people no longer have access to it.

This is confirmed by a spokesperson from Yuga Labs Decrypt the company believes the inscription of BAYC #1626 is an illegitimate monkey.

“Only NFTs minted from Ethereum contract: 0xBC4CA0EdA7647A8aB7C2061c2E118A18a936f13D are legitimate BAYC NFTs,” said a spokesperson for Yuga, referring to the smart contract that gave the collection 10,000 Apes.

Whether the new Ordinals feature can replace Ethereum’s popularity for hosting digital art is questionable, according to CEO of Web3 development platform Hiro Alex Miller. Hiro is building tools for Stacks, a network built on top of Bitcoin that aims to bring smart contract functionality to the underlying network.

“As much as I’m very pro-Bitcoin and think there’s going to be a massive ecosystem there, it’s not going to replace Ethereum NFTs tomorrow, or probably at all,” Hiro said Decrypt. – I think it will be interesting to see where this goes.

Miller said the Teleburn feature provides a solution for keeping track of a digital art’s provenance — the record of previous ownership — across blockchains, adding that determining which digital collectible is the real thing if it exists in circulation is challenging on several chains.

The Hiro boss also compared how data is stored on Bitcoin using Ordinals versus Ethereum NFTs. Although it is possible to store assets such as images on-chain using Ethereum, most NFTs point to an asset stored off-chain, whether it is also an image or some other type of file. With Inscriptions, the data is stored directly and permanently on Bitcoin’s blockchain.

Regardless of whether BAYC #1626’s inscription is an unofficial version of its Ethereum-based predecessor, Miller believes the collectible will “have a lot of value” due to its first-of-a-kind nature.

“He basically made it something that is now extremely rare [Ape]” Miller said, referring to the categories that NFTs are often assigned value based on the rarity of their attributes. “The market is going to value it as its own unique work of art.”