The sale of the digital image from the Taproot Wizards project came as popularity surges for the NFT-like creations minted atop the Bitcoin blockchain’s Ordinals protocol. All in, some 19 lots sold by Sotheby’s raked in a combined $1.1 million.
In the historic auction house’s first-ever sale of the Ordinals inscriptions known as “NFTs on Bitcoin,” a batch of three pixelated images from a mushroom-themed collection drew about $450,000, or roughly five times the highest estimates.
The NFT-like Ordinals inscriptions are anathema to some Bitcoin purists who want to preserve the blockchain for financial applications. But a few of the images are fetching eye-popping sums in the in-real-life arka world.