Amid the ongoing crypto summer, Bitcoin NFT sales have surpassed Ethereum. The action is driven by a sudden spike in Bitcoin Ordinals-based NFT collections, particularly led by the NodeMonkes collection.
Bitcoin NFT sales saw an impressive 80% increase week-over-week, reaching $168.5 million. Notably, three of the top five best-selling NFT collections during this period were Bitcoin Ordinals-based. In contrast, Ethereum’s sales amounted to $162 million, as reported by CryptoSlam data.
Introduced in January 2023, Ordinals introduced a platform enabling the creation of NFT-like assets. It empowered users to embed files such as images into satoshis (sats) — the smallest unit of Bitcoin.
The Uncategorized Ordinals (not associated with any specific collection) recorded the highest sales, totaling over $43 million across more than 47,000 transactions.
Following closely behind was the Bitcoin-based collection NodeMonkes, which achieved over $41 million in sales, marking an impressive increase of nearly 170% compared to the previous week. Additionally, the Ordinals collection Natcats secured the fourth position for the week, generating over $10 million in sales.
NodeMonkes comprises 10,000 distinctive pixelated profile pictures (PFP)-style Ordinals. It prides itself as the inaugural 10,000-member collection on Bitcoin.
Although other 10,000-count-Ordinals collections had debuted earlier, the NodeMonkes team engraved their collection onto the blockchain in February 2023, merely a month after Ordinals’ inception.
On March 2, NFTstats, an X user announced that NodeMonkes’ market capitalization had surpassed $500 million, positioning it as the third-largest PFP-style NFT collection across all blockchains, trailing only the Ethereum-based Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC).
The reasons behind the recent surge in attention towards the collection remain ambiguous.
Kevin Wu, founder of the NFT collection Graycraft, expressed in a post on February 22 that NodeMonkes possesses “meaningful provenance” as the pioneer PFP-style NFT collection on “the inaugural chain.” This attribute provides it with a compelling narrative for competitive advantage, potentially attracting speculative investors.
