A highly-priced Ethereum NFT from one of Web3’s prominent PFP collections has been taken out of circulation, and symbolically linked to an Ordinals inscription, as a group of Bitcoin enthusiasts celebrate the expensive, attention-grabbing act. CryptoPunk #8611 was sold for approximately 55 Ethereum or $95,000 on Saturday, and within hours, the NFT was burned, linking it to inscription 12,456,749, an NFT-like asset on Bitcoin bearing the same image as its precursor.
The move to effectively destroy CryptoPunk #8611 was a community-led effort involving Wolf Capital Developer Nathan Stein on Twitter and Bitcoin Bandits’ holders, a Western-themed collection of Ordinals inscriptions. The Bitcoin Bandits spokesperson stated that around 150 people contributed to this initiative. When a digital asset is burned, it’s locked up forever in an uncontrolled digital wallet. In this case, CryptoPunk #8611 now resides in a well-known burn address containing $21 million worth of Ethereum.
Ordinals, a trending Bitcoin protocol which debuted earlier this year, enables the creation of NFT-like assets on Bitcoin by inscribing data to individual satoshi, the smallest denomination of currency a Bitcoin can be divided into. This data may range from images and videos to plain text, enabling users to produce BRC-20 tokens.
While NFTs are remarkably new, Ordinals inscriptions are even more recent, resulting in a wave of excitement, bugs, and scams surrounding the oldest cryptocurrency. The community around Ordinals is forming, with the increasing teleburning trend of transferring pricey NFTs from the Ethereum ecosystem and directing them toward other assets on Bitcoin.
This is not the first instance of a costly NFT being burned to symbolically shift an asset’s underlying chain from Ethereum to Bitcoin. In February, an NFT from the Bored Ape Yacht Club collection, worth approximately $169,000, was burned by Jason Williams, who later described the act as “throwing a Lamborghini into a trash compactor” for fun.
However, unlike Williams’ action, CryptoPunk #8611 was not burned merely for amusement, according to Stein. The ultimate goal is to establish a series of Ordinals inscriptions, each representing a portion of ownership in CryptoPunk #8611, even though the actual asset can no longer be owned by anyone on its native chain. The collection of inscriptions will be created after the inscription pointing to CryptoPunk #8611 is sent to a digital wallet associated with Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s pseudonymous inventor, in what is essentially a one-way trip.
In summary, the burning and symbolic linking of CryptoPunk #8611 to the Ordinals inscription exemplifies the growing popularity and dynamic potential of NFTs and Bitcoin. While it raises questions about asset ownership and legitimacy, the unique applications and linking of these technologies continue to fuel community excitement and debate.
Source: Decrypt
