- December 16, 2023
- Posted by: [email protected]
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Sotheby’s, a prominent auction house, concluded its first inscription auction with remarkable results, accumulating a total of approximately $451,000. This unique event unfolded online from December 6 to 13 in New York, featuring a collection of select BitcoinShrooms from the innovative Bitcoin Ordinals project, meticulously crafted by the artist Shroomtoshi.
According to Sotheby’s website, these pixelated and handcrafted artworks are ”a sophisticated tapestry, intricately interweaving the historical narrative, cultural essence, and core technical intricacies of Bitcoin. Representing a masterful and playful guide to the revolutionary world of Bitcoin, the auction spotlighted three unreleased pixelated images inspired by the iconic Super Mario series.
The three distinct pieces in the collection include the S shroom (symbolizing self-sovereignty), the sovereign individual, and the BIP39 seed, which serves as the foundational element from which all Bitcoin addresses and their corresponding private keys derive. Originally estimated to fetch between $20,000 and $30,000 each, the final auction results far surpassed expectations.
Breaking down the impressive individual sales, The S shroom achieved an astounding $241,300; the Sovereign Individual garnered a noteworthy $107,950; and the BIP39 seed fetched a substantial $101,600. In total, the three pieces collectively achieved a staggering $450,850, surpassing the highest estimated total price of $90,000 by an impressive fivefold.
Shroomtoshi, hailed by Sotheby’s as a technically inclined digital artist and a trailblazer in the burgeoning Ordinal ecosystem, expressed that the BitcoinShrooms collection serves as a pixelated recap of the first 13 years of Bitcoin. The art not only pays homage to the 8-bit style of the ’90s, evoking a sense of nostalgia, but also serves as a tool to raise awareness about Bitcoin’s core principles.
The Ordinals, which are non-fungible tokens (NFTs) of the Bitcoin ledger, are at the heart of the collection. Sotheby’s clarified the distinction between ‘inscriptions’ and ‘ordinals,’ emphasizing that an ordinal represents the unique serialized satoshi, while an inscription encapsulates the encoded media content embedded within the ordinal.
This success for Sotheby’s is not its first foray into the realm of NFTs. In June, the auction house successfully sold digital collectibles owned by the bankrupt Singaporean crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital for a remarkable total of $10.9 million. Furthermore, Sotheby’s entered the NFT market in May by launching a secondary marketplace, allowing users to acquire curated NFTs on both the Ethereum and Polygon networks. The auction house continues to demonstrate its commitment to embracing the evolving landscape of digital art and blockchain technology.
