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Bitcoin ordinals: after burst of NFT bubble, blockchain art gets another medium, smaller and self-contained, now sold by auction house Sotheby’s
- Bitcoin ordinals have images, videos or text attached to satoshis – the smallest denomination of bitcoin – and are much smaller than other NFTs
- Last December, Sotheby’s auctioned three bitcoin ordinals, which fetched five times their high estimate, and a January auction made US$1 million
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In 2021, the meteoric rise of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) sent a shock wave through the art world. Just over a year later, the cryptocurrency bubble burst and trading volumes of these related digital assets plunged by 91 per cent from April to December 2022.
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For a while, we heard little more about this blockchain-based technology, its ability to provide proof of ownership for digital works and investment potential overshadowed by the collapse of crypto trader FTX and regulatory uncertainties.
But the past year saw some recovery in the value of bitcoin, Ether (the cryptocurrency of Ethereum) and other cryptocurrencies that NFTs are priced in. According to Statista, the data portal, the NFT market is expected to grow by nearly 10 per cent annually and be worth over US$3 billion by 2028.
Some art market platforms are sounding optimistic about the NFT market again. For example, the auction house Sotheby’s, which was sued in August 2023 for its promotion of Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFTs in 2021 before prices tanked, is again pushing its blockchain offerings, albeit in a new format.
In December 2023, it held an auction for bitcoin ordinals.
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