BTC Miners Earn $5M on Ordinals, Reddit NFTs Get Backlash and More
Bitcoin (BTC) miners have pocketed over $5 million from creating nonfungible token (NFT)-like inscriptions using the Ordinals protocol.
Transaction fees for Ordinals transactions exploded 240% from $1.5 million on March 10 to $5.2 million by April 12, according to data from Dune Analytics.
The rise came on the back of a fairly slow period between February 16 and March 10, which went from $1 million to $1.5 million. Before that, fees reached $1 million in the first four weeks after the Ordinals protocol launched on January 21st.
Almost 1.1 million Ordinals have been entered on the Bitcoin network, consisting mainly of JPEG images and text, but also consisting of PDFs, video and audio formats.
About 100 to 500 inscriptions are processed in each Bitcoin block, which typically contains between 2,000 and 3,000 transactions. Block 783,758 on April 3 saw a record 3,785 entries, representing nearly 87% of the entire block.
Reddit’s Gen3 NFTs plagued by botting claims
Online community platform Reddit launched its third batch (Gen 3) of NFTs on April 12 – a “Futures Realities Collection” of collectibles created by over 100 artists.
Reddit explained in its announcement that the artists behind each limited edition Avatar will receive royalties on each sale and no cryptocurrency was required to purchase them.
However, the release did not come without problems. Many Reddit users claimed they missed out on the sale because spambots swooped in almost immediately.
It is also believed that the bots were the cause of Reddit’s NFT store crashing shortly after launch.
“They didn’t incorporate any kind of spam or bot prevention, like a simple captcha. Of course the site got overloaded,” wrote one user with another noting that there was no way you didn’t even think of stopping bots during this. loose.”
Twitter user “Pastel Alpha” tweeted that they were able to get “a good amount” of the NFTs “even though the site completely died” and thanked the “bot partners” for helping with the capture.
Reddit previously released a group of Halloween-themed avatars in October, which were followed by and Super Bowl avatars in February.
Adidas releases the first in a series of dynamic NFTs
Footwear brand Adidas has released the first leg of its latest dynamic NFT collection “ALTs by Adidas”, the latest move by the company on its quest to expand the NFT ecosystem.
The dynamic NFTs will evolve based on the decisions and commitment of the owner, according to a announcement on April 11 who described the collection as the “first step” towards owning an “ALTS by Adidas” identity.
The floor price of each Adidas NFT is 0.666 Ether (ETH) ($1,275) and has collected 351 ETH ($672,000) in trading volume so far. There are now 8,989 owners, 56% of them unique.
Related: NFT guarantees could help mass adoption of the technology, says Web3 boss
There are 16,000 items in total and the creators take 10% of each sale.
Collectors must purchase and burn Phase 1 and 2 of Adidas’ “Into the Metaverse” tokens to receive ALTS from the Adidas NFT.
Be Inoperable, My Friend: Bruce Lee Enters Web3
An NFT compilation commemorating the late Kung-Fu fighter and movie star, Bruce “Little Dragon” Lee, has been released by the Bruce Lee Estate in partnership with Shibuya, an NFT-powered video platform.
Plans for the release were revealed on April 11 when Lee’s Twitter account, managed by his family, shared an old video clip of Lee then transforming him into an animated version of himself.
The NFTs sold at a starting price of 0.008 ETH, or $15, and 13,907 were minted in the first 24 hours, totaling over $205,000 according to the smart contract address on Etherscan.
The NFTs were drawn by artist Emily “pplpleasr” Yang and were designed by Shannon Lee – Bruce Lee’s daughter.
Despite being an “open edition” collection, collectors can only mint a maximum of 100 of the NFTs.
Other good news
NFT marketplace OpenSea launched “OpenSea Pro” last week, a new specialized NFT marketplace aggregator that aims to serve the needs of professional NFT traders. The service was made possible by OpenSea’s acquisition of fellow NFT aggregator, Gem, in April 2022.
An NFT trader bid on a free NFT by buying it for 100 Ether ($191,000). The token was part of NFT marketplace OpenSea’s Gemesis NFT collection to celebrate the launch of OpenSea Pro on April 4. Some believe the trader meant to bid the token for $100 instead.
NFT Creator, Emily Xie: Creating “organic” generative art from robotic algorithms
