According to a Dune Analytics analysis, daily transaction fees for minting Bitcoin Ordinals inscriptions reached an all-time high of 9.28 BTC, or about $257,460, on Thursday. The Bitcoin Apes, a variant of the popular Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection that is being replicated on the Bitcoin Network, are largely responsible for the spike. Almost $3.3 million in fees have been spent to add photos, text, and even video games on the original blockchain since the debut of the Ordinals project in January 2023.
“[Bitcoin Apes] follow the same reasoning as Bitcoin Punks in that the first byte-perfect image of a Bored Ape that gets inscribed is the real one,” said Leonidas, a pseudonymous NFT historian, on Twitter. “Almost $1 million has already been spent inscribing the 10,000 exact duplicates of the Bored Ape Yacht Club photos onto Bitcoin.”
Leonidas claims that almost 1GB of the Bitcoin blockchain’s 466 GB of data is currently photographs of monkeys. “In a strange way, this is actually quite positive for Bitcoin,” Leonidas explained. “Every additional transaction cost paid to inscribe these apes helps to safeguard the Bitcoin network by providing miners with a new revenue source to complement block rewards.” Leonidas believes that projects like Bitcoin Apes could provide an answer to the long-standing dilemma of what to do when the pre-programmed Bitcoin block rewards reach zero in 2140.
Yet, while JPEGs are becoming more prevalent on the Bitcoin Network, most Ordinal Inscriptions, according to Dune, are text-based. “The Bitcoin Apes are not a competitor to the original Bored Ape Yacht Club collection,” Leonidas remarked. “In fact, several of the folks who have signed up are major fans of the original collection and would want to hold one of the original Bored Apes eventually.”
According to Leonidas, the culture behind one of the most iconic NFT collections was certain to expand to other blockchains, and Bitcoin Apes support that tendency. Several owners of the Bored Ape Yacht Club are concerned that counterfeit NFTs are being generated and traded on the Bitcoin network. Nonetheless, Leonidas believes that such worries are unfounded.
“Blockchains solve the problem of provenance for digital art,” Leonidas stated. “There is no question about whether the official Bored Ape Yacht Club holders are the holders of the original and Bored Apes—anybody can verify that ownership on-chain.” “This is merely another derivative effort of a legendary PFP collection that, in my opinion, only promotes the culture of the original PFP collection to even more individuals, resulting in value being driven back down to the official holders.”
“People are actually doing the original Bored Ape Yacht Club holders a favor by keeping all 10,000 photographs entirely on-chain for the first time so that they can exist on Bitcoin forever at no expense to the official holders or Yuga,” Leonidas explained.
While Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT members may not be paying to have their digital collectibles inscribed on Bitcoin, the floor price of Bitcoin Apes is progressively growing.
The floor price for Bitcoin Apes is 0.0101 BTC, which is approximately $285.00; the floor price for Ordinals Wallet is 0.21 ETH, which is around $380.00 on Ordinals Market. Bored Ape Yacht Club Ethereum NFT, on the other hand, has a floor price of 57.5 ETH, which is around $104,036 on OpenSea.
