Yuga Labs’ controversial auction of its debut Bitcoin NFT collection concluded Monday, with 288 successful bidders bidding for as many pieces in the limited series, spending a combined $16.49 million worth of BTC.
The collection, TwelveFold, garnered 3,246 total bids during the 24-hour auction, which began Sunday, according to a Yuga spokesperson.
Of those, the highest bid was 7.1159 BTC, or roughly $159,500. The lowest successful bid was 2.2501 BTC, or just over $50,000.
The top 288 bidders will receive their inscriptions within the week, per Yuga.
The last 12 pieces of the 300-count limited series will be held for contributors and distributed as part of Yuga’s philanthropic programs.
Yuga, the $4 billion company behind the dominant NFT collection Bored Ape Yacht Club, has only ever previously released NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain.
All other collections besides TwelveFold created or owned by Yuga—including Bored Ape Yacht Club, Mutant Ape Yacht Club, Otherside virtual land plots, CryptoPunks, and Meebits—also featured at least 10,000 NFTs.
TwelveFold NFTs are a marked departure from that body of work. They are generative art pieces inscribed to the Bitcoin blockchain via Ordinals, a recently launched method of committing art to Bitcoin by permanently inscribing media on individual Satoshis, each of which represents 1/100,000,000 of a full Bitcoin (BTC).
The pieces are all 12×12 grids—an homage to how data is stored on the Bitcoin blockchain—and are generative art pieces that combine 3D graphics and hand-drawn features.
Each of the 288 pieces won at auction today will be generated by the same code, and pieces won at a higher bidding price will not appear qualitatively different from pieces won at lower bidding prices, according to Yuga. Pieces from the collection, though, will be numbered and generated according to their rank in the bidding process.
