OnChain Monkey NFTs Double in Price After Creators Put Them on Bitcoin

Buzz around Bitcoin-based NFTs—via the recently-launched Ordinals protocol—keeps growing by the day, with record-setting mints on Thursday and high-value sales over the past day. And one established Ethereum NFT collection is reaping the benefits of going multi-chain, seeing its prices surge after revealing Bitcoin-based counterparts.

OnChain Monkey, a collection of 10,000 Ethereum NFT profile pictures (PFPs) minted in 2021, used Ordinals to “inscribe” all of its existing artwork on Bitcoin over the past day. Now the NFT holders on Ethereum can also say that their respective collectibles live on Bitcoin, as well.

Prices for the Ethereum NFTs have almost tripled since the announcement, with the floor price—that is, the cheapest listed NFT on a marketplace—for the project jumping from 0.79 ETH at the start of the day (per NFT Price Floor) to a peak of 1.75 ETH before settling to about 1.5 ETH (nearly $2,500) as of this writing.

According to data from CryptoSlam, the move has fueled a 12,200% increase in NFT trading volume for the Ethereum project over the past 24 hours compared to the previous span. The analytics platform reports about $1.1 million in sales over the past day for a project with lifetime secondary sales totaling almost $39 million.

Metagood, the startup behind OnChain Monkey, said it put all 10,000 NFTs onto Bitcoin via the Ordinals protocol using a single transaction, much as it did for the original Ethereum collection back in 2021.

In a Twitter Spaces today, Metagood co-founder Danny Yang said that enabling trading was the next step for the team but suggested that other tooling needs to be created around Ordinals to facilitate that feature. He also noted that Metagood plans to build a bridge between Ethereum and Bitcoin to let NFT holders switch between the two versions.

“They are the same on both chains,” an OnChain Monkey Discord moderator wrote earlier today. “Buy on ETH and you will have access to the BTC version when the tools catch up.”

The project’s Discord server is filling up with users who claim to have purchased one of the Ethereum NFTs following the Bitcoin announcement and are asking for details on how it will work.

OnChain Monkey is part of Metagood’s push to use Web3 initiatives to fund programs that benefit communities. These include efforts to fund coral restoration and provide aid to Ukraine amid the Russian invasion. Metagood, co-founded by venture capitalist Bill Tai alongside Yang and Amanda Terry, raised $5 million in December.

Metagood says that it minted the first 10,000 NFT project on Ordinals—a claim that the creators of Bitcoin Punks, a clone of popular Ethereum project CryptoPunks, have also made.

Bitcoin Punks began inscribing its NFTs via Ordinals before OnChain Monkey, but opted to put each Punk as a separate inscription—a process that stretched from Wednesday into Thursday. OnChain Monkey, on the other hand, committed its entire collection to Ordinals via a single transaction late Wednesday.

Editor's note: This article was updated after publication to clarify when OnChain Monkey and Bitcoin Punks were inscribed via Ordinals.