An expensive Ethereum NFT from a prominent PFP collection in Web3 has been permanently taken out of circulation and symbolically associated with an Ordinals inscription, as a group of Bitcoin enthusiasts celebrate this costly and attention-grabbing endeavor.
On Saturday, CryptoPunk #8611 was sold for approximately 55 Ethereum or $95,000, as reported by Etherescan. Hours later, the NFT was deliberately burned in a manner that references inscription 12,456,749, an NFT-like asset on Bitcoin that bears the same image as its predecessor.
The decision to effectively destroy CryptoPunk #8611 was driven by the community, led by Nathan Stein, a developer at Wolf Capital, on Twitter, along with holders of Bitcoin Bandits. A spokesperson for the project informed Decrypt that around 150 individuals contributed to this initiative.
https://twitter.com/MINHxDYNASTY/status/1670311105984598016
When a digital asset is burned, it is permanently locked away in a digital wallet that nobody controls. CryptoPunk #8611 has now been put to rest in a well-known burn address that also holds $21 million worth of Ethereum.
https://twitter.com/natan_stein/status/1669556240396226560
"What a wild night," exclaimed an account named Minh on Twitter. Minh shared a video documenting the purchase and burning of CryptoPunk #8611, describing the entire process as "chaotic, yet beautiful."
Ordinals, a buzzy Bitcoin protocol launched earlier this year, enables the creation of NFT-like assets on Bitcoin by "inscribing" data onto individual satoshis, which are the smallest denomination of Bitcoin. This data can include images, videos, or plain text, and has even been used to create BRC-20 tokens.
While NFTs can be seen as a burgeoning industry or an emerging frontier for digital art, Ordinals inscriptions are even more recent, leading to a surge of hype, bugs, and scams surrounding Bitcoin, the oldest cryptocurrency.
As the Ordinals community continues to evolve, the practice of redirecting expensive NFTs from the Ethereum ecosystem to other assets on Bitcoin, known as teleburning, is becoming increasingly common. Thus, the CryptoPunk burn on Saturday may sound somewhat familiar because it is not the first instance where a valuable NFT has been burned to symbolically transition an asset's underlying chain from Ethereum to Bitcoin.
In February, Jason Williams burned an NFT from the Bored Ape Yacht Club collection, which was valued at around $169,000 at the time. Williams told Decrypt shortly after that he found it quite enjoyable to "throw a Lamborghini into a trash compactor."
Yuga Labs, the creators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, noted that the Ordinals inscription associated with Williams' BAYC NFT represents an unauthorized ape. They explained that only tokens originating from the project's original smart contract are considered valid, granting holders commercial rights and access to events.
However, unlike Williams' action, the burning of CryptoPunk #8611 was not solely for entertainment purposes, according to Stein. The ultimate objective is to create a series of Ordinals inscriptions corresponding to a fraction of ownership in CryptoPunk #8611, even though the actual asset can no longer be owned on its original chain.
Once the current inscription pointing to CryptoPunk #8611 is ceremoniously sent to a digital wallet belonging to Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, it will effectively become a one-way trip, as Stein mentioned in a tweet.
Furthermore, members of the Bitcoin Bandits community, who pooled their funds to purchase CryptoPunk #8611, have also been entered into a contest related to a separate inscriptions project. However, this is considered secondary to the main intention behind the burning, as stated by the spokesperson.
"The Bandits Community did this to show the way," the spokesperson expressed. "They believe
