Super Mario-Style Bitcoin NFT Mushroom Fetches Over $200,000 at Sotheby's

• Sotheby's First Ever Blockchain-Enabled Sale Yields Approximately $450,000
• The Auction Overview
• NFT Market Resurgence?
• The Ordinals Inscriptions
• The Digital Images and their Performance

Sotheby's First Ever Blockchain-Enabled Sale Yields Approximately $450,000

In a landmark event, Sotheby's successful auction of inscriptions created using Bitcoin$42,260 -0.64%'s blockchain protocol, Ordinals, fetched around $450,000. The pixelated collection, known as BitcoinShrooms, outperformed the highest estimates by five times, suggesting a possible mainstream fervor for tradable digital images colloquially referred to as NFT on Bitcoin.

The Auction Overview

Concluding on Wednesday, the auction featured three images, including a pixelated avocado which sold for over $100,000, and a design that appears to derive from a mushroom from the Super Mario series, which was sold for approximately $240,000, as per Derek Parsons, the auction house spokesperson. A total of 148 bids for the three items were submitted, with over two-thirds of the bidders being new to Sotheby's. Parsons hinted at plans for something more soon in a recent email communication.

NFT Market Resurgence?

The auction's results bring to mind the frenzy that swept through digital asset markets a few years back, when digital works of art and non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, began to attract staggering amounts and capture mainstream attention. An NFT by Beeple, for instance, fetched $69 million in a Christie's auction. Many of these collections, however, were built on the Ethereum$2,315 -2.42% blockchain.

The Ordinals Inscriptions

Debuting last year with new technology introduced by Casey Rodarmor on Bitcoin, the Ordinals inscriptions have seen bouts of popularity this year adequate to cause congestion and high fees on the distributed network originated in 2009 as a peer-to-peer payment system. A debate is on among Bitcoin users and developers over the need to filter out transactions in inscriptions, akin to NFTs minted using the Ordinals project. This is because they are not a core financial use in line with the vision of many original blockchain advocates. Hence, the idea that certain images could be considered high art might tip the balance of the debate towards profit interests.

The Digital Images and their Performance

The three digital images came from the BitcoinShrooms collection of Ordinals inscriptions, created by the pseudonymous artist Shroomtoshi, according to Sotheby's website. Initially, the digital avocado, known as BIP39 SEED, was expected to yield between $20,000 and $30,000. However, it ultimately sold for $101,600.

Edited by Jonathan Stoker