Super-Mario Style Mushroom NFT Surpasses $200K at Sotheby's in Bitcoin Hysteria

• Sotheby's First Sale with 'Inscriptions' Generated by Bitcoin's Ordinals Protocol
• Plans for More and Their Impact
• The Popularity of Ordinals Inscriptions and Their Consequences
• Notable Images from the Auction

Sotheby's First Sale with 'Inscriptions' Generated by Bitcoin's Ordinals Protocol

The very first sale of 'inscriptions' created using Bitcoin$42,260 -0.64%'s Ordinals protocol by Sotheby's, part of a pixelated collection known as 'BitcoinShrooms', amassed around $450,000. This figure is five times higher than the highest estimates, potentially indicating a growing mainstream enthusiasm for tradable digital images, colloquially termed as 'NFT on Bitcoin'. The auction, which concluded on Wednesday, comprised three images, including a pixelated avocado which fetched over $100,000 and a drawing seeming to be derived from a Super Mario franchise mushroom, sold for over $240,000, according to Derek Parsons, a spokesperson for the auction house. There were altogether 148 bids on the three lots, and over two-thirds of all the bidders were newcomers at Sotheby's.

Plans for More and Their Impact

There are plans to do more soon, Parsons wrote in an email. The results echo the frenzy that swept the digital asset markets a few years ago when digital artworks and non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, began to attract staggering amounts and draw public attention. A NFT by artist Beeple fetched $69 million at Christie's auction house. However, many of these collections were built atop the Ethereum$2,315 -2.42% blockchain.

The Popularity of Ordinals Inscriptions and Their Consequences

Ordinals inscriptions, which debuted late last year with new technology developed by Casey Rodarmor on top of Bitcoin, had bouts of enough popularity this year to cause congestion and high fees on the peer-to-peer payment network launched in 2009. There's a raging debate among Bitcoin users and developers about whether transactions in NFT-style 'inscriptions' created using the Ordinals project should be filtered, as they do not constitute a Core financial use in line with the vision of many original blockchain proponents. As such, the idea that certain images could be considered great art might swing the balance of the debate towards profit interests.

Notable Images from the Auction

The three digital images come from the BitcoinShrooms collection of Ordinals inscriptions, by pseudonymous artist Shroomtoshi, according to Sotheby's website. The digital avocado, known as BIP39 SEED, was initially expected to fetch between $20,000 and $30,000, but it ended up selling for $101,600.

Edited by Jonathan Stoker