Bored Ape owner burns his NFT to shift it from Ethereum to Bitcoin

A valuable digital collectible from the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) collection has been burned. The owner of the non-fungible token (NFT) said that the burn was aimed at shifting the existence of the asset from the Ethereum to the Bitcoin blockchain.

BAYC owner burns his NFT

The burned NFT is #1626, an Ape belonging to the most valuable NFT collection globally. The recent transaction for this NFT on the OpenSea marketplace happened in November last year, and it sold for 108ETH, equivalent to nearly $432,000 at the time of the sale.

The owner of this NFT, Jason Williams, claimed burning the BAYC #1626 last weekend, which prevented the asset from being traded again on the Ethereum blockchain. “Whether putting bloated JPEGs on Bitcoin’s base chain is smart or not is a whole ‘nother discussion, but I think it’s going to be a lot of fun seeing how it plays out,” Williams said.

Williams added that the Ape NFT now existed on the Bitcoin blockchain. He noted that where the Ape was burned is associated with an Inscription made using Ordinals. The latter is a project that supports content such as images and videos to be allocated to single satoshis, and they will exist on Bitcoin permanently in the form of Inscriptions.

The number of Inscriptions on Bitcoin is almost 100,000, but there are a handful of marketplaces where they can be traded. Buyers and sellers are brought together through the ordinal Discord server.

The burn was done through a new feature of Ordinals known as Teleburn. This feature generates a unique location with every new Inscription where the digital assets are burned. Users can use this feature to assign an asset from one network to a Bitcoin Inscription after it is removed from circulation.

The Ordinals feature was created through a partnership with Rodarmor. Hamilton said that he approached Rodarmor to create the Teleburn feature last weekend. During the meeting, Hamilton said that Williams wanted to burn his BAYC. The recent burn was not the first time the ordinal Teleburn feature has been used.

According to Hamilton, the Teleburn feature will be used by people to bridge digital collectibles. He added that Rodarmor was planning to extend this feature to other blockchains like Solana and Tezos. Hamilton pointed out that the function was setting the standard to represent assets across the blockchain.

Yuga Labs responds to the burn

The co-founder of Yuga Labs, Greg Solano, commented on this burn saying that the Inscription was linked to the BAYC #1626, an unlicensed reproduction of the original NFT. Solano said that Williams no longer possesses this NFT on Ethereum.

A spokesperson from Yuga Labs also commented on this burn, saying that only NFTs minted from the Ethereum contract for the project could be ranked as legitimate BAYC NFTs. he referred to the smart contract that enabled the collection to yield 10,000 Apes. However, it remains to be seen whether Ordinals could challenge the popularity of Ethereum in hosting NFTs.