Sotheby's begins first Bitcoin Ordinals NFT auction for BitcoinShrooms

Auction house Sotheby's has begun its first Bitcoin BTC +1.39% Ordinals sale, an online-based auction featuring three items from the BitcoinShrooms collection of 222 works.

Sotheby’s metaverse division announced the sale on X, with the auction running from Dec. 6 to Dec. 13.

The BitcoinShrooms collection is the brainchild of purportedly early Bitcoiner and pseudonymous digital artist Shroomtoshi, with the pixelated art designed to showcase the blockchain’s history, culture and core technicalities, Sotheby’s said.

The three lots comprise "S," which stands for "Self-Sovereignty;" "Sovereign Individual," drawing inspiration from James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg's Bitcoin-adjacent book; and "BIP39 Seed," in reference to commonly used 12 to 24 recovery seed phrase backups.

There have been 107 bids placed across the lots so far, with S attracting the most interest at 44. Each lot value was estimated in the $20,000 to $30,000 range with no reserve. However, this is likely to be exceeded, with S, Sovereign Individual and BIP39 Seed registering current bid highs of $42,000, $50,000 and $28,000, respectively.

"The BitcoinShrooms collection is a pixelated recap of the first 13 years of Bitcoin, a homage to the 8-bit style of art that expresses a slight nostalgia for the 90s, a way to soil tens of thousands of SSDs spread across the world with my art (next level cyber-vandalism), a tool to raise awareness about Bitcoin and what I personally view as its core principles, an ironic way to vent at what I see as its annoying pop elements and aberrations," Shroomtoshi said about the collection. "It is a thank you to those I worked with and learned from, to those who are not around anymore but whose names should not be forgotten."

What are Bitcoin Ordinals?

The Bitcoin Ordinals protocol, launched in January by Casey Rodarmor, offers a new way to store and trade digital content on Bitcoin. By utilizing satoshis, the smallest units of bitcoin, users can engrave NFTs, BRC-20 tokens and other arbitrary data directly onto the blockchain, with each piece becoming a unique, tradeable asset.

While the terms "Ordinals" and "inscriptions" are often used interchangeably, an ordinal is technically a unique serialized identifier for a single satoshi, and an inscription is the content or data attached to that specific satoshi.

BRC-20-style tokens have also been spreading to other chains in recent weeks, including Ethereum, Solana, Near, Polygon, Celo and Fantom, causing a spike in transactions amid an ongoing debate over the use of inscriptions.

Sotheby's is no stranger to auctioning off NFT collections, having sold Dmitri Cherniak's "The Goose" NFT for $6.2 million in June, 37 "Grails" NFTs that same month for over $5 million, and 500 pieces of "Themes and Variations" generative art for $1.2 million in July.

However, the auction house found itself on the receiving end of a Bored Apes-MoonPay class action lawsuit in August, with Sotheby's accused of misleading people by stating a "traditional" art collector purchased 101 Bored Apes for $24.4 million when the buyer was the now defunct crypto exchange FTX.

Crypto hardware wallet manufacturer Ledger signed an "exclusive" partnership with the centuries-old auction house in October, offering wallets to Sotheby's top NFT collectors.