Yuga Labs concludes $16M TwelveFold auction

Yuga Labs’ TwelveFold auction, which saw the company sell its first collection of Bitcoin ordinals, has concluded on March 6 following a weekend sale.

Yuga Labs auction brings in $16.4 million

The auction saw 288 successful bidders win ownership of the collectible crypto assets. Those bidders collectively placed more than 735 BTC ($16.4 million) on 288 assets. The top bidder placed a bid of 7.1159 BTC ($160,000) on a single collectible.

The auction is notable as it is one of the first major applications for collectibles inscribed through Bitcoin’s new Ordinals feature. This feature aims to provide an alternative to NFT standards on Ethereum and other blockchains, which are used much more frequently.

Yuga Labs initially announced the sale on Feb. 28. At that time, it did not indicate the exact time or date that the auction would begin. The sale finally began on March 5 at 3:00 p.m. PST and ran for 24 hours. The start time was announced shortly before the event.

Yuga Labs is best known for its Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) collection, which is currently the most popular Ethereum NFT project by trading volume. OpenSea data indicates that 2,738 ETH ($4.3 million) of “apes” changed hands over the past 24 hours.

Ordinal community condemns trust model

The fact that Bitcoin Ordinals are in their infancy means that, in order to take part in the auction, bidders had send funds directly to Yuga Labs. As such, bidders had to trust the company to return unsuccessful bids after the auction’s conclusion.

This approach was criticized by Twitter user Ordinally, who noted that although Yuga is a notable company, the poor trust model could lead to later scams. Ordinals creator Casey Rodarmor later took note and more harshly told Yuga Labs to “get f—d.” Rodarmor committed to boycotting the firm if it runs a similar auction in the future.

This issue will likely be resolved as Ordinals are developed further and more practical transaction methods are introduced. Ordinal transactions currently require specific wallets, and Ordinals.com currently issues several warnings about transaction risks.

According to community data from Dune Analytics, just 326,000 Ordinals have been inscribed on the Bitcoin blockchain since last month.