5 Bitcoin NFT collections you must know about

The sales of Bitcoin “NFTs”, Ordinals, reached $50 million in the first week of March 2024 — second only to NFTs on Ethereum. Let’s look at a few the most popular Ordinals collections, including Bitcoin Punks and NodeMonkes.

Ordinals are here to stay

When Ordinals first appeared on the scene in January in 2023, hardly anybody would have thought that a year later their sales would exceed those of Solana NFTs. More than once the media predicted the demise of Ordinals, and many disliked them because of the increase in Bitcoin transaction fees that they caused.

And yet, Ordinals are not going anywhere: they are supported by major marketplaces like Magic Eden and OKX, and “fungible” Ordinals — BRC-20 — are traded on exchanges like Binance and KuCoin.

We’ve written a lot about Ordinals, BRC-20, and other quirky related tech, such as recursive inscriptions. But for some reason we’ve neglected the collections themselves! What are the best-selling NFT collections on Bitcoin? Let’s find out.

Note that here we won’t be looking at BRC-20 — only at collections that have artwork. Along the way we’ll explore some important properties of Ordinals, such as small file size and the relationship between the inscription time and market value.

1) NodeMonkes: the top seller on Magic Eden

With a floor price of 0.625 BTC (over $40,000), NodeMonkes can hold its own against any blue-chip collection on Ethereum. Their 30-day trading volume is also impressive: 3,000 BTC or around $200 million. This makes NodeMonkes the highest-selling Ordinals collection of 2024.

NodeMonkes are 10,000 very pixelated apes — something between CryptoPunks and BAYC. On March 4, a single Monke (#2769) sold for over $1 million — another milestone for Ordinals. In another record sale, an unknown collector swept several alien Monkes for a total of $3.5 million. Even one of the BAYC co-founders bought himself a Monke.

By the way, when looking at Ordinals collection stats on Magic Eden, note the overall inscription range in which a collection falls, like this:

Remember that each and every Ordinal inscription has its unique global number in the network, and that these numbers are, indeed, ordinal, starting from 1 for the very first inscribed satoshi. So every “Bitcoin NFT” has not only its ID within a collection but also a global ID within the whole Ordinals ecosystem. In this case, you won’t find any NodeMonkes among the inscriptions numbered 1–83,521.

The earlier a satoshi was inscribed, the more valuable an Ordinal is, all other things being equal. Also, the time a collection was inscribed on satoshis is considered its creation date — rather than the date it was released to the public.

For this reason, NodeMonkes pride itself on being the “first original 10k collection inscribed on Bitcoin”, even if there is at least one more 10k PFP collection (Bitcoin Frogs) that was publicly launched earlier — but inscribed later.

2) Bitcoin Frogs

Speaking of Bitcoin Frogs, they were the second-highest selling (1.24k BTC volume) collection of Ordinals PFPs in February 2024, inscribed in March 2023 with the numbers lying between 381,224 and 412,389.

Note that this range is around 31,000 sats wide, and only 10,000 of those are frogs. This means that in between the Frogs there are 21,000 other inscriptions — plus lots and lots of uninscribed satoshis.

The 10,000 frogs are only lightly pixelated — but even though the images are more detailed than NodeMonkes, the file size is still small. You can look up individual Ordinals’ sizes on Gamma.io — for example, this frog is just 3,488 byte, or less than 3.5 kilobyte. This is important, since Ordinals’ metadata is inscribed directly on the Bitcoin blockchain, and each kilobyte adds to the transaction fee.

Some frogs wear glasses or have laser eyes, some smoke a pipe or hold a slice of pizza in their mouth, etc. But — and this is interesting — all types of the same trait (body, eyes etc.) have the same rarity: flaser eyes are equally rare as black sunshades or blue-and-red sunglasses. This prevents speculation based on rarities alone and allows (as the website says) “satoshi-based rarities to emerge”.

3) Bitcoin Shrooms

The Shrooms are among the earliest Ordinals, with inscription numbers between 19 and 1075. There are only 224 of them in total, though; that’s why they can’t compete for the title of the first 10k PFP collection.

It’s partly thanks to those early ordinal numbers that the Shrooms are so expensive: the floor price is 4.56 BTC as of March 9, 2024. That’s over $300,000!

Each Shroom is unique. There’s one with the head of the Pope, another that looks like Batman, an avocado Shroom, a Jesus Shroom, and so forth.

Bitcoin Shrooms had the honor of being the first Ordinals sold at a Sotheby’s auction — yet another proof that Ordinals are now a serious business.

4 & 5) Bitcoin Punks and Ordinal Punks

Ordinal Punks is the project with the second-highest floor price after Bitcoin Shrooms — around 3.9 BTC per punk. There are only 100 of them with inscription numbers between 407 and 642.

Ordinal Punks are not to be confused with Bitcoin Punks. This latter collection includes 10,000 inscriptions ranging from 89 to 34,399. The floor price is much lower, though: only 0.034 BTC.

Wait a second, but didn’t we say earlier that NodeMonkes were the first 10k PFP collection inscribed on Bitcoin — starting with the inscription number 83,522? And didn’t we just say that Bitcoin Punks also have 10k NFTs but start from no.89?

You forgot the “original” part. Bitcoin Punks are a copy of Crypto Punks, while NodeMonkes were designed from scratch.

These are just five collections among hundreds and even thousands — and new drops happen every day. We will keep following the development of the Ordinals market and report on the latest technology shifts and the most popular collections. Stay tuned!