On Monday afternoon, Yuga Labs, the creators of the famous Bored Ape Yacht Club, announced their first BTC-based NFT collection. The TwelveFold collection will feature 300 non-fungible tokens minted on the Bitcoin blockchain. The auction is scheduled to launch later this week.

Yuga Labs Announces its First 300 Ordinals

Yuga Labs, the creators of the famous Bored Ape Yacht Club, announced on Monday afternoon its first-ever BTC-based collection. The TwelveFold NFTs represent an experimental limited-edition collection of 300 non-fungible tokens minted on the Bitcoin blockchain and inscribed on Satoshis. According to the announcement, the auction is set to start later this week and an alert will be issued 24 hours in advance.

TwelveFold is a base 12 art system localized around a 12×12 grid, a visual allegory for the cartography of data on the Bitcoin blockchain. The collection includes highly-rendered 3D elements as well as hand-drawn features which serve as an homage to the ordinal inscriptions currently done by hand. All of these choices are a departure from what’s expected from Yuga. But, you know. F*** doing expected things.

The so-called Ordinals—Bitcoin NFTs—represent a relatively recent development—though their originator believes they were unearthed rather than invented—that took the community by storm. Their existence also quickly sparked a heated debate on whether should even exist or if the Bitcoin blockchain should remain “pure”. Despite the discussion and some pushback, it didn’t take long for them to be ported to the Litecoin blockchain.

A Resuragance for NFTs

Non-fungible tokens experienced their height in 2021 and have been hit particularly hard by the “crypto winter” of 2022. By the last summer, online interest in NFTs even fell to zero. Furthermore, the SEC finally narrowed down their broad probe of non-fungible tokens to an investigation of Yuga Labs.

Recent months have, however, demonstrated a notable resurgence in their popularity—or, at the very least, in their trading volume. Together with the surfacing of Ordinals, NFT aggregators likely played a major part in this trend as, by the end of 2022, their trading volume hit $1.9 billion.

Early 2023 saw another major uptick after a relative newcomer to the game—Blur—announced the launch of its long-awaited BLUR tokens. Since then, the aggregator positioning itself as catering to professionals, reached record volumes, and even managed to eclipse the previous reigning king among NFT marketplaces—OpenSea.

This article originally appeared on The Tokenist

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