Bitcoin Ordinals project NodeMonkes flipped Bored Ape Yacht Club earlier Monday with a market cap of 7,300 BTC, approximately $490 million, according to cross-chain NFT marketplace Magic Eden. For comparison, Bored Ape Yacht Club’s market cap at the time was 136,500 ETH, or about $483 million, according to NFT analytics site NFT Price Floor.
The Ethereum-based Apes are back at the top at the time of writing, but the collections remain close: there is less than $30 million worth of crypto between their respective market caps at the time of writing.
Launched in December, NodeMonkes is a collection of 10,000 8-bit monkey-themed digital collectibles. The market cap for an NFT project is the floor price multiplied by the number of assets in the collection.
In February, NodeMonkes #2769 sold for 17 BTC, about $1.08 million at the time, on Magic Eden. The NodeMonkes floor shot up from 0.53 BTC to 0.83 BTC in just 12 hours on Sunday, although it has since calmed down to 0.67 BTC.
NodeMonkes flipped BAYC after moving from the BTC floor of 0.54 to 0.78 today.
You can’t see it in full, but I thought I would show the full map.
NodeMonke floor: $52,600
BAYC floor: $48,780 pic.twitter.com/QNkAe5jUiV— NFTstats.eth (@punk9059) March 18, 2024
Bitcoin Ordinals projects have seen rising demand in recent months as the price of Bitcoin itself reaches new all-time highs. Over the past week, Ordinals projects have generated a trading volume of $135 million, according to data from CryptoSlam, while Ethereum NFTs have achieved a sales volume of $113 million.
Runestone, another prominent Ordinals project, has also increased in value recently. After an airdrop on March 14, the collection of 112,383 tokens on Bitcoin skyrocketed to the top three most traded NFT projects according to DappRadar data, with a trading volume of $5.3 million in 24 hours.
While the Runestone airdrop was an important milestone for the collection, the main event will take place after Bitcoin’s halving in April, when Ordinals creator Casey Rodarmor’s Rune token protocol comes online.
“Runestone is a pre-Runes project where the Runestone inscription that people receive in the airdrop will be converted into a Rune token on Casey’s Rune Protocol when it comes out in 8 weeks,” NFT historian and Runestone spokesperson Leonidas told us earlier. Declutter.
Before last week’s airdrop, expectations for the Runestone airdrop were so high that a single Runestone inscription, 63,140,674, sold at auction for 8 BTC, approximately $533,956.
Not wanting to be left out of the initial interest in Ordinals last year, Bored Ape Yacht Club creator Yuga Labs launched its own collection of Ordinal inscriptions called TwelveFold, a series of 300 generative NFT artworks.
“We are excited about Ordinal inscriptions and what the future holds for digital artifacts on Bitcoin,” said Greg Solano, co-founder of Yuga Labs at the time.
Edited by Andrew Hayward