NFTs are not for everyone. Ever since non-fungible tokens first entered the public consciousness, there has been a strong backlash against tokens that are essentially just a means of authenticating data. Part of this negative aspect is the massive financialization and speculation surrounding these tokens, as well as a reaction to environmental concerns, followed by Ethereum's switch to proof-of-stake in 2022. Basically resolved.
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But the general public's aversion to NFTs hasn't stopped the art world from embracing them. In 2021, Christie's auction house made history when it sold Beeple's “Everydays” collage for $69 million. Since then, the storied company has further expanded into the cryptocurrency realm, including countless NFT auctions, investing in Web3 companies via Christie's Ventures, and even launching its own NFT marketplace, Christie's 3.0 .
The company, which was founded before the birth of the American Republic, is taking this a step further today through its first auction of Inscription, an NFT-like token on Bitcoin made possible by Casey Rodarmor's Ordinals Protocol. While the Ordinal Maxi Biz (OMB) sale is not the first inscription auction (Sotheby's outright beat out its closest competitor late last year), it is a turning point of sorts for Ordinals, and the sale of these objects. This suggests that it may continue to be sold in the future. It just has staying power.
“Slowly but surely, interest is growing,” Nicole Sales Giles, director of digital art sales at Christie's, told CoinDesk in an interview. “The market has matured considerably since the 2021 boom, when Christie’s first got involved. We do not take our responsibilities lightly.”
This is a meaningful statement from Sales Giles, who was instrumental in launching the Beeple auction that first brought public attention to NFTs. The auction house has no current plans for further inscription sales, but Sales Giles said this is just the beginning of its foray into the world of inscriptions.
The works up for auction were curated by pseudonymous Ordinals proponent and OMB co-creator ZK Shark, along with artist Tony Tafuro. birkin bag. The starting bid for each auction lot was $100, which corresponds to the starting price for the Beeples auction, which was set because Christie's “didn't fully understand the market at the time.” Sales Giles said.
There's an argument that Ordinals represents a bigger technological advance than NFTs because it's a way to allow artists to actually write data directly on-chain. In contrast, NFTs are best thought of as digital signatures of data that often resides elsewhere. You can't actually own them because they live on “someone else's servers”.
An example of how this can go wrong happened after the disastrous collapse of FTX. When the exchange went down, images related to the 1.5 million NFTs minted at the Coachella festival were stored on the FTX website and were no longer accessible. With Ordinals, the only way your data will be erased is if Bitcoin goes down.
“I don’t think Inscription will ever fully replace current NFT token standards like ERC-721,” Sales Giles said, adding that artists can mint data-intensive things like HD videos on-chain. Mentioned the current file limitations of Inscription that may prevent you from doing so. “There will always be a market for every new technology that comes along.”
However, this auction comes at an interesting time for epitaph adoption. Currently, two of the five largest NFT projects by market capitalization, Runestones and NodeMonkeys, are built on Bitcoin, according to data from CoinGecko. And Ordinals is less than a year old.
While the Bitcoin community is divided over the question of whether Ordinals is primarily disrupting what is supposed to be a financial network and raising transaction fees, it's clear that Inscription isn't going away. .
As ZK Shark pointed out in a recent article, ×postBitcoin has been a system for both value transfer and data storage since its inception, and Satoshi Nakamoto carved a message for the world into the “origins'' of blockchain.
“We're interested in the historical stories of the art behind these collections,” Sales-Giles said. “It’s been really interesting for us to see the zeitgeist building around this community.”
