- Ordinals inscription number 8, which hails from the Honey Badger collection, fetched 10.4 BTC, which equates to over $450,000 on NFT marketplace Magic Eden on Thursday.
- The NFT, which was purchased by an anonymous buyer who goes by “OG General” on X, was minted on January 5 and its sale shows how far Bitcoin Ordinals have come in months.
It has been the year of Bitcoin Ordinals as the NFT series brought back to the Bitcoin ecosystem the buzz and widespread interest that it lost to Ethereum and other token-native blockchains. In the latest show of the Ordinals’ popularity, one of the earliest Ordinals has fetched over $450,000 in a record-setting purchase.
On Thursday, Ordinal inscription number eight from a collection titled Honey Badger sold on NFT marketplace Magic Eden for 10.4 BTC, and with top crypto trading at over $43,600, this translates to $454,000, a new record for a Bitcoin NFT. The token was created on January 15.
(Image courtesy of Magic Eden on X.)
The Honey Badger collection contains 10,000 NFTs, owned by over 1,300 people. Their floor price, which means the lowest price investors can get their hands on a Honey Badger NFT, is 0.004 BTC, or $174. And while #8 was the highest-priced purchase, other NFTs from the collection are listed at much steeper prices on Magic Eden, including a few that go for 777 BTC, or $3.4 million.
The NFT was purchased by an anonymous investor who goes by “OG General” on X. He took to the social media platform to talk about his purchase, stating, “Back to work, I am just warming up…It is never too late to jump on the train.”
🪖 Inscription #8 was inscribed when almost no one cared about inscriptions, on Jan 15 at 1 sat/vB. " Ordinals Can not be stopped !! " Back to work , I am just warming up. LFG !! Thanks to the legends @mfigge and @huuep for providing an early insight to me months ago about… pic.twitter.com/V6cOmY3sLF
— OG General (@TheOG_General) December 8, 2023
He added:
This community, you all are built different. Special thanks to all those who helped educate me and bring me up to speed. Ordinals is not about one sale, It is about where we are all going. Truly blessed and privileged to own a piece of our history.
Bitcoin Ordinals Take Off Amid NFT Dropoff
Commenting on the purchase, Magic Eden’s Chris Akhavan praised the Bitcoin community which he says has thrown its full weight behind the Bitcoin ordinals even as NFTs on other networks, including Ethereum and Solana, fall off. According to data by Crypto Slam, Bitcoin is accounting for as much in trading volume for NFTs as Ethereum and has overtaken Solana.
In his commentary to Decrypt, Chris stated:
We love the energy across the Ordinals ecosystem right now, and seeing big marquee sales like Inscription #8 going for close to $460K really solidifies the value people see in digital artefacts that are permanently inscribed on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Ordinals launched in January and since then, Bitcoiners have minted over 46 million tokens. Since launch, these NFTs have generated over $100 million in fees, reports Dune, an on-chain data analysis platform.
This popularity has caught the eye of mainstream players. This week, one of the world’s largest fine art brokers Sotheby’s announced a new online auction of Ordinals from the BitcoinShrooms collection by an artist named Shroomtoshi.
