Yuga Labs Launches New Collection on Bitcoin Blockchain – ARTnews.com

Yuga Labs, the company that owns such popular NFT collections as Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks, will launch a new NFT collection on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Most NFTs, and all of Yuga Labs’ previous collections, are minted, stored, traded and purchased on the Ethereum blockchain. Until recently, the Bitcoin blockchain was not used to create NFTs because Bitcoin had little infrastructure to support smart contracts, which essentially act as a digital receipt that assigns and tracks ownership of a digital artwork.

Since 2014, third-party developers have attempted to expand this gap and have been moderately successful. But the cost of pushing transactions on Bitcoin, the culture of the Bitcoin community, and the ease of use of creating tokens and non-fungible tokens on blockchains like Ethereum, Solana, and Tezos have pushed NFTs created on Bitcoin to the side.

[Read an ARTnews refresher on how NFTs work.]

Now, however, Yuga Labs is launching its new collection, TwelveFold, on Bitcoin, which may signal that times are changing, as the company is currently one of the biggest players in the NFT game.

TwelveFold is a generative collection of 300 pieces. In a blog post, Yuga Labs co-founder Greg Solano described it as a collection that “explores the relationship between time, mathematics and variation.” Each of the 300 tiles is built around a 12 x 12 grid. Each of the 144 points on the grid shows a shiny ball of different sizes of color, almost like a ball of paint.

TwelveFold uses a new method to create NFTs on Bitcoin. Instead of relying on smart contracts to create tokens and NFTs, a developer named Casey Rodarmor created “Ordinals” or “Ordinal Inscriptions”. These digital assets are “inscribed” on a satoshi, the smallest unit of Bitcoin possible (1/100,000,000 of a Bitcoin). This inscription makes it possible to link data to a satoshi and thus host metadata – the data that describes a digital resource.

This metadata can describe basic facts such as the name of a digital artwork and its transaction history. Because generative art is made using lines of code, in the case of TwelveFold, the metadata written on the satoshi likely includes this code.

The 300 works from the TwelveFold collection will be auctioned on a dedicated website later this week, although no specific date has been given. Bids will be made in Bitcoin.

Results from the auction can provide interesting data. In a flagging NFT market, will Ordinals be the next big thing?