Members of the cryptocurrency community have criticized nonfungible token (NFT) company Yuga Labs for how it intends to auction off its latest collection of Bitcoin NFTs.
On March 5, Yuga started bids for its “TwelveFold” collection, which entails 300 NFT-like images being written on Satoshis utilizing the protocol native to Bitcoin called Ordinals. Of the collection, 288 will be given to the top 288 bidders.
In order to participate in the bidding process, participants must deposit their entire bid amount in Bitcoin to a specific Bitcoin address that is under Yuga’s control. Yuga claimed it would return the BTC to those who failed to place the highest bid, while winners would just pay the amount they bid.
However, this strategy has drawn criticism from some in the cryptocurrency community, who claim that manually processing reimbursements for lost bids is equivalent to living in the “stone age.”
The owner of a Twitter account dedicated to Ordinals dubbed the auction concept a “scammers fantasy” and said that while they doubt Yuga would protect the BTC from unsuccessful bids, the manner in which the auction was conducted sets a “REALLY terrible precedent.”
Even the author of Bitcoin Ordinals, Casey Rodarmor, commented on the page, ordering Yuga to “go fucked” and calling the way the auction was conducted “degenerate nonsense.”
He continued by saying that if Yuga held a similar auction, he would strongly advise people to oppose it.
Several individuals criticized the auction mechanism, noting that there was a chance that some people may overpay for a TwelveFold because of a potentially large price difference between the highest and lowest bids in the top 288.
Despite some criticism, many people were pleased to see a significant project transition to Bitcoin, like Yuga, which became well-known because of numerous Ethereum-based NFT collections.
On setting up this auction, Yuga attempted to follow the Bitcoin route, which was afterward praised by Ordinally, who had earlier attacked the collection.
Yuga’s BTC collection was praised as a “huge net benefit for Ordinals” by the Ordinals-based collection Ordinal Pizza OG. Despite the critiques, wealthy bidders still wanted to compete for the top slot to win Yuga’s first BTC collection.
According to the TwelveFold website, the highest price at the time of writing was 1.11 BTC, or roughly $25,000. The lowest reported bid was 0.011 BTC, or roughly $250.
