“Genesis Cat,” a digital art image slapped on top of the Bitcoin blockchain’s Ordinals protocol by the Taproot Wizards team, has sold for $254,000 at a Sotheby’s auction.
The image was a special edition 1-of-1 piece by Taproot Wizards artist Francisco “FAR” Alarcon, featured as part of a wider sale of Ordinals inscriptions by Sotheby’s. The auction started on January 12 and ended on Monday.
The sale price for Genesis Cat was more than twelve times the $15,000 to $20,000 estimate for the lot, and comes after Sotheby’s last month sold three pixelated images of the “BitcoinShrooms collection for a combined amount of $450,000.
The cat image was sold as part of the “Ordinals Curated Sale,” consisting of 19 lots from 11 different artists. Collectively, they raised approximately $1.1 million, Sotheby’s spokesman Derek Parsons told CoinDesk in an email.
Lot 17 from the Sotheby’s auction, “Black Rare Sat 20,159,999,999,999,” raised $165,100, according to Parsons, which he said he understood was a record for a so-called “Rare Satoshi,” which are believed to have unique properties that make them highly sought after.
The eye-popping numbers for these Ordinals inscriptions – dubbed “NFTs on Bitcoin” – have drawn comparisons to the NFT frenzy that took over the Ethereum blockchain a few years ago. Transactions involving Ordinals have contributed to the congestion on the Bitcoin blockchain, while drawing the ire of some purists who would like to see the bandwidth of the largest blockchain in the world kept free for financial payments.
According to the Sotheby’s description of the auction lot for the Genesis Cat image, Alarcon is “an artist and engineer who explores the intersection of visual art and technology.”
“His research delves into the material history of computer-generated graphics and examines digital imaging from historical and conceptual perspectives,” Sotheby’s said. “He investigates computer simulations and visualizations, focusing on their impact on our understanding of the physical world through film, video games and virtual worlds.”
The Genesis Cat piece was the anchor of a series of 3,333 “Quantum Cats” minted by Taproot Wizards, in the first sale since Ordinals “NFTs on Bitcoin” project raised $7.5 million from investors last year.
The Quantum Cats collection is designed in honor of a Bitcoin improvement proposal known as OP_CAT, according to a press release from Taproot Wizards.
Dan Held, Taproot Wizards’ chief marketing officer, told CoinDesk that the price for Genesis Cat is the amount that will be returned to the project, including the artist, who co-founded it. According to Held, the Sotheby’s fee will be charged on top of the winning bid price.