Bitcoin NFTs are the talk of the Web3 world right now, thanks to a new way to “mint” media and assets on the layer-1 blockchain through the Ordinals project. And, as with many past NFT network launches, cloned versions of Ethereum’s early and influential CryptoPunks are dominating the early buzz around Ordinals.
CryptoPunks, created by Larva Labs in 2017, is a seminal NFT project that set the template for the modern profile picture (PFP) trend. The 10,000 Ethereum assets were initially released via a free mint, well before there was a thriving NFT market, but have gone on to generate almost $2.5 billion worth of trading volume in the years since.
Ordinals just launched on the Bitcoin blockchain in late January, but there are already multiple CryptoPunks-inspired projects gaining steam on the platform.
The most prominent so far is Ordinal Punks, which spans 100-pixel avatars that have been “inscribed” on Bitcoin through the Ordinals project and can be traded. Unlike some Punks clones seen in the past, however, they’re not direct clones of the original CryptoPunks collection.
Some on Crypto Twitter believe that Ordinal Punks is based on a derivative Ethereum collection called Mutant Punks—in other words, a derivative of a derivative. However, a person connected to the project clarified to Decrypt that Ordinal Punks “used an open-source algorithm and CC0 Punk sprite sheet to generate new Punks.”
One Ordinal Punk sold for 9.5 BTC late Wednesday, or nearly $215,000. While that’s about double the entry-level price for a real CryptoPunk—about 64 ETH right now, or nearly $106,000—that particular Ordinal Punk is based on the very rare alien CryptoPunks, which have sold for as much as nearly $24 million worth of ETH in the past.
In another example,
