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NFTs aren’t for everyone. In the years since non-fungible tokens first entered the public consciousness, there has been intense backlash against what is essentially just a way to authenticate data. Some of this negativity was in response to the gross financialization and speculation surrounding these tokens, and environmental issues that have since been effectively resolved by Ethereum’s move to proof-of-stake in 2022.
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However, the general public’s aversion to NFTs hasn’t stopped the art industry from embracing them. In 2021, Christie’s auction house made history with the $69 million sale of Beeple’s “Everydays” collage. Since then, the legendary company has expanded further into the crypto space, including numerous NFT auctions, investing in Web3 companies through Christie’s Ventures, and even launching its own NFT marketplace, Christie’s 3.0.
The company, founded before the birth of the American Republic, is taking things a step further today with its first auction of inscriptions, the NFT-like tokens on Bitcoin, powered by Casey Rodarmor’s Ordinals Protocol. Although the sale of the “Ordinal Maxi Biz (OMB)” is not the first auction of inscriptions (Sotheby’s defeated its biggest competitor late last year), it is something of a turning point for Ordinals, and a signal that these works of art may have just endurance.
“Slowly but surely, people are becoming very interested,” Christie’s Director of Digital Art Sales Nicole Sales Giles told CoinDesk in an interview. “The market has matured quite a bit since the 2021 boom when Christie’s first got involved. We do not take our responsibility lightly.”
This is a meaningful statement from Sales Giles, who was instrumental in setting up Beeple’s auction that first brought public attention to NFTs. Although the auction house has no plans yet for more inscription sales, Sales Giles said this was just the beginning of his move into the world of inscriptions.
The works in the auction were curated by pseudonymous Ordinals attorney and OMB co-creator ZK Shark, and include works by artists Tony Tafuro and berkinbags. Each auction lot has a starting bid of $100, a callback to the starting price of the Beeple’s auction, which was set at that price because Christie’s “didn’t really fully understand the market at the time,” Sales Giles said.
It can be argued that Ordinals represents a significant technological advancement over NFTs, in part because it is a method by which artists can inscribe data directly onto the chain. NFTs, on the other hand, are better thought of as digital signatures for data that often exists elsewhere. Since they are on “someone else’s server”, they cannot really be owned.
An example of how this can go wrong happened after the disastrous collapse of FTX: when the exchange failed, images associated with 1.5 million worth of NFTs minted at the Coachella Festival became inaccessible because they were on an FTX website were stored. With Ordinals, the only way to erase the data is if Bitcoin goes down.
Also see: What are NFTs and how do they work?
“I don’t think inscriptions will ever fully replace current NFT token standards like ERC-721,” Sales Giles said, noting current file restrictions of inscriptions that could prevent artists from creating data-intensive things like HD videos on-chain . “There will still be a market for any new technology that comes to market.”
But the auction comes at an interesting time for inscription adoption. Currently, two of the five largest NFT projects by market cap, Runestones and NodeMonkeys, are built on Bitcoin, according to CoinGecko data. And Ordinals are less than a year old.
While the Bitcoin community has been torn over whether Ordinals is destroying something primarily intended as a monetary network and driving up transaction fees, it’s clear that inscriptions aren’t going away.
As ZK Shark noted in a recent .
“We are interested in the artistic-historical story surrounding these collections,” says Sales Giles. “It is very interesting for us to see how the spirit of the times is shaping up around this community.”
