The first auction of the engravings conducted by the important auction house Sotheby’s was a success and closed with a raise of approximately $451,000.
From December 6 to 13, Sotheby’s New York held an online sale of select BitcoinShrooms from Shroomtoshi’s Bitcoin ordinals project.
According to the company’s website,
“Elegantly weaving the nuanced tapestry of Bitcoin’s history, culture, and core technicalities, each unique, pixelated, and hand-crafted piece forms part of a masterful, yet playful guide to the revolutionary realm of Bitcoin.”
The auction included three images from the unreleased polka dot collection, which appears to be inspired by Super Mario. These include the S mushroom (the “S” stands for self-sovereignty), the sovereign individual, and the BIP39 seed from which all “Bitcoin addresses and their corresponding private keys” are ultimately derived.
The initial estimate for each of the three pieces was between $20,000 and $30,000.
When the auction closed, the results were:
- Mushroom S sold for $241,300.
- The Sovereign sold for $107,950;
- A BIP39 seed sold for $101,600.
In total, the three were priced at $450,850. This is five times more than the highest estimated total price of $90,000.
Bitcoin’s 13-year dotted summary
Sotheby’s describes Shroomtoshi as an artistically inclined digital artist and a pioneer in the “thriving curation ecosystem” with an encyclopedic knowledge of Bitcoin.
The artist commented:
“The BitcoinShrooms collection is a segmented summary of the first 13 years of Bitcoin, a tribute to the 8-bit art style that expresses a slight nostalgia for the 90s, a method of destroying tens of thousands of SSD drives scattered around the world with a technician. (->Cyber Vandalism Level Next), which is a tool to raise awareness about Bitcoin and what I personally consider to be its founding principles, is a cynical way to vent what I consider to be disturbing elements of deviation and aberrations. It is a thank you to those I worked with and from whom I learned, to those who are no longer here but whose names we should not forget. It is An intense knowledge and journey for the curious.
Ordinals are the non-fungible tokens (NFTs) of Bitcoin’s ledger.
The auction house noted that “inscriptions” and “ordinals,” although often used interchangeably, have different meanings. An ordinal is an asset: a unique serialized satoshi that can be transferred by its owner. An inscription is the encrypted multimedia content embedded in the arrangement.
Meanwhile, Sotheby’s is not new to the NFT space.
The auction house sold digital collectibles owned by bankrupt Singapore-based cryptocurrency hedge fund Three Arrows Capital (3AC) for a total of $10.9 million in June.
In May, Sotheby’s launched a secondary market for NFTs. It allows users to purchase specific NFTs on the Ethereum and Polygon networks.