What is BTC TwelveFold?

In 2023, there have been many eye-catching topics in the Web3 industry, including the rise of Arbitrum, the competition between the two new public chains, Aptos and Sui, and the impressive performance of Dookey Dash.

The boom of numerous projects, coupled with the slight recovery in prices of mainstream cryptocurrencies, has left many with the impression that Web3 is living up to the expectations of its followers.

However, the news about BTC, the dominant role in the crypto world, could be even more exciting for enthusiasts. Since the launch of the Ordinals protocol on December 14, 2022, over 300,000 NFTs have been minted. And the first set of 10K Bitcoin Punks minted for free using Ordinals was sold out within a day.

BTC has always served as the barometer of the crypto market and a synonym for high value. No one could have imagined that it could create something new beyond the mere price when combined with NFTs.

And now, more NFTs based on the BTC blockchain have emerged.

About TwelveFold

On February 28, 2023, Yuga Labs, the parent company of Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), announced that it will launch a new BTC NFT collection called TwelveFold. This marks Yuga Labs’ new attempt to bring NFTs to the Bitcoin blockchain, which introduces 300 limited edition NFTs on the Bitcoin network. Inscribing on satoshis is what the project is mainly about.

According to the project team, each NFT artwork is a 12×12 grid, combining 3D graphics and hand-drawn features. They are designed and created by Yuga Labs’ in-house art team and will be auctioned using BTC.

Just as what the “inscribing on satoshis” move implies, TwelveFold is an art collection inscribed on satoshis, the smallest unit of BTC, on the BTC blockchain. They represent a complete NFT project and will not have any additional rights or use cases added at the moment.

Also, TwelveFold will not be associated with any previous, ongoing, or future Yuga projects, making it purely an NFT artwork.

Therefore, Yuga Labs announced that TwelveFold will be sold to the public exclusively through auctions.

TwelveFold Sales Performance

On the morning of March 6, 2023, Yuga Labs officially announced the TwelveFold auction details:

• All bids for the TwelveFold collection will be placed with BTC. Users participating in the auction will need two BTC wallet addresses, one for placing bids and the other for receiving the NFTs after winning bids.
• To place a bid, users need to input an empty self-custodial BTC Taproot and enable a wallet address to receive NFTs there. This wallet will serve as the receiving address for the NFTs if the bid is successful, and will be the return address if the bid is not among the top 288.

Since only 288 out of the 300 pieces will be auctioned, users will win the auction as long as their bids rank among the top 288.

Unlike Yuga Labs’ previous PFP NFT collections, TwelveFold is a generative art collection with a limited edition of 300 pieces. The collection has now been completely auctioned off.

On March 7, 2023, Yuga Labs announced the results of the 24-hour auction. The 288 winning bidders will receive their inscriptions within a week of the end of the auction, while the rest of the auction bidders will have their bid amount returned to their receiving address within 24 hours.

The highest bid in this auction was 7.1159 BTC, and the lowest winning bid was 2.25 BTC.

According to Yuga Labs, there were a total of 3,246 bidders in this auction, generating a value of 735.7 BTC (approximately $16.5 million).

The Expansion of BTC NFTs

Seeing the outcome of the TwelveFold auction and the sellout of Bitcoin Punks, many may wonder what BTC NFTs exactly are and how they differ from previous NFT collections.

In simple terms, BTC NFTs are NFTs based on the BTC ecosystem. They seem to be not very different from ETH NFTs and Polygon NFTs.

However, the issuance of NFTs on the BTC blockchain is based on sats, the smallest unit of BTC.

Sats refer to the eighth decimal place of BTC and have a ratio of 100,000,000:1 to BTC. It is named sat in honor of Satoshi’s pioneering work.

Many people may still wonder why, despite the continuous NFT boom over the past two years, there is not too much news about BTC NFTs and why the mainstream NFTs in the market are created based on the Ethereum standards.

Additionally, as the undisputed leader in Ethereum NFTs, why did Yuga Labs put its focus on the Bitcoin chain, a network that has been criticized for small block space and slow transaction speed?

Thanks to the recently widely discussed Ordinals protocol, NFTs are introduced to the BTC field. The ordinal numbers generated through this protocol have exceeded 100,000, which could potentially expand NFTs on BTC.

Before the birth of the Ordinals protocol, deploying NFTs on the BTC network faced significant technical challenges. That is to say, the BTC network lacked relevant protocol standards suitable for the development of NFTs. That’s why the most mainstream NFT protocols before were created based on Ethereum.

Ordinals Protocol

The Ordinals protocol was released shortly after developer Casey Rodarmor made a post on January 21, 2023. The protocol allows users to insert a relatively large amount of data into transactions, which can be used to create collectible images on the network, similar to many popular NFT projects.

This approach was actually available on the previous BTC network, but it is too small for the current mainstream NFT projects. However, with BTC network upgrades like Taproot in 2021 and SegWit in 2017, the Ordinals protocol became deployable and is able to expand the relevant functionalities.

Launched on BTC, the Ordinals protocol is bringing broader NFT functionalities to the world’s largest blockchain. It will potentially reshape how the NFT market interacts with some of the largest blockchains.

Ordinals is now explicitly defined as an NFT protocol based on the BTC network, designed to assign a unique identity to each sat.

Using the Ord software, the Ordinals protocol adds data to sats and allows software users to track them based on an ordinal numbers system. In other words, the Ordinals protocol represents sats, the smallest unit of Bitcoin, in the form of NFTs, and gives sats full transactional and collectible value.

When the smallest unit on the BTC network becomes a new tradable asset, we consider it as an expansion of BTC to some extent, which is primarily reflected in more application scenarios of the BTC network.

Since the inception of the Ordinals protocol, users can input information on the BTC blockchain, including text, images, audio, and video. In this way, users create NFTs on the BTC network, known as BTC NFTs.

Compared with traditional NFTs, BTC NFTs possess the following characteristics:

• Unique: Each sat is serially numbered in the order in which it is mined, starting from 0. The first sat in the first block has the ordinal number 0, the second has the ordinal number 1, and the last has the ordinal number 4,999,999,999. This gives each sat a unique ID.
• Indivisible: Sats are the smallest unit of BTC and cannot be further divided.
• Transferable: Transfer input sats to output sats in a first-in-first-out manner, thus achieving directed transfers. But as there are no smart contracts, a centralized platform is needed to act as an intermediary.
• Describable: BTC NFTs are stored on the BTC blockchain and therefore have a limit in size. Since NFTs exist on-chain, they cannot reference off-chain data, and therefore cannot be modified. Unlike ETH NFTs, which are indexed through off-chain IPFS or AWS, BTC NFTs do not support on-chain royalties as they do not offer smart contract capabilities.

The real change that the Ordinals protocol brings to the BTC network may not be creating new types of NFTs, but proving that developers can build new products on old blockchains and impact the market in the process. This indicates that in the future, products like the Ordinals protocol can bring innovations that further meet market demand for various old blockchain networks.

Undoubtedly, the Ordinals protocol makes BTC more practical as a currency itself. As one of the earliest and largest-traded cryptocurrencies, it has been in existence for years and people have become accustomed to its peer-to-peer transaction mode. Now, it can also be used to trade or collect NFTs, similar to what can be done on the Ethereum network. This marks the expansion of BTC’s application scenarios into another mainstream sector of the crypto market.

However, some critics argue that the application of the Ordinals protocol will increase the burden on the blockchain network and push up the fees of regular transactions. This is indeed a risk, but the added utility of using BTC to buy NFTs could potentially boost the price of BTC itself, which is seen as a positive outcome for many investors.

The recent rise in BTC prices has also been influenced to some extent by this aspect.

BTC NFTs vs. ETH NFTs

NFTs are considered an essential component of building Web3, where games, social media, and financial derivatives operate through decentralized blockchain applications controlled by user wallets. NFTs have long been the ​​focus of the Ethereum blockchain, accounting for approximately 70% of total NFT sales.

Many blockchain networks, including Cardano and Solana, have been dubbed Ethereum killers in recent years as they aim to challenge Ethereum’s dominant position in the Web3 and NFT space. However, so far, Ethereum still holds the largest user base and ecosystem resources.

This is due to Ethereum’s years of leading advantage, and its deep involvement in the NFT space is the main reason that other competitors in the industry find it difficult to catch up. However, the development of Ethereum has not reduced the negative influence that BTC, the world’s first cryptocurrency, has brought to the whole crypto space. The BTC network remains the largest blockchain network currently. \
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Since BTC has been in existence longer than any other cryptocurrencies, it can be said that Web3 is also powered by BTC and has a massive user base. Therefore, the emergence of BTC NFTs may potentially challenge the dominant position of ETH NFTs.

But at this stage, Ethereum has very mature NFT creation tools, while Ordinals is just a protocol to create tools on the BTC network. BTC NFTs are still in their early stages, with projects like TwelveFold being among the few NFT series on the BTC network.

In conclusion, BTC NFTs may revolutionize the NFT space and are therefore worthy of our continuous attention.

The Impact of TwelveFold on the BTC Ecosystem

Rather than focusing on the impact of TwelveFold on the BTC ecosystem, it is more important to consider the changes that the participation of Yuga Labs, the entity behind TwelveFold, will bring to BTC NFTs.

There is actually more noteworthy information beyond TwelveFold itself, as TwelveFold is just a representative of the BTC NFT boom.

DeGods, an NFT project based on Solana, has destroyed 535 NFTs on the Solana blockchain and minted new ones in a separate block on the BTC chain using the Ordinals protocol.

Crypto Punks is the first NFT project to be issued on the Bitcoin network. BAYC is also considering issuing NFTs on Bitcoin. If blue-chip NFT projects can generate substantial returns simply through a migrating process, why not seize the opportunity?

Gamma aims to bring together collectors, creators, and investors in the BTC ecosystem. Users can use the tools provided by the Gamma robot to mint NFTs, which solves the problem of high technical barriers, complexity, and time-consuming processes involved in creating NFTs on the BTC network.

The above are just some typical NFT projects on Bitcoin. In fact, since the emergence of the Ordinals protocol, BTC NFTs have been developing vibrantly.

Due to the 1MB limit of the BTC network space, the number of transactions each block contains is limited, with only about 7 transactions that can be processed per second, let alone the subsequent long confirmation time. Fortunately, Lightning Network’s fast on-chain transaction processing, along with the data processing of the Ordinals protocol, makes it possible for NFTs to be collected and traded on the BTC chain. This will bring about more extensive expansion and innovation, as evidenced by the TwelveFold auction.

Conclusion

As the forefront application for building Web3, NFTs play a crucial role in the development of blockchain in finance through liquidity provision and brand promotion. They serve as a means to facilitate the circulation of various crypto assets. Additionally, their inherent IP attributes contribute to the mass adoption of Web3, while also bringing innovation and value to the development of different blockchain ecosystems.

Yuga Labs’ participation in BTC NFTs through TwelveFold will bring about new changes in transactions and creative applications on the BTC network. It is an early adopter of BTC NFTs and has promoted the expansion of the BTC NFT ecosystem. Currently, other series, including OnChainMonkey, DeGods, and Sappy Seals, have also started inscribing their collections on the BTC network. We look forward to seeing how the introduction of NFT protocols to BTC would change the industry.