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.”

Decrypt reached out to Metagood co-founder and COO Amanda Terry for comment and clarification on the Ordinals rollout but has yet to hear back. 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 Terry and Yang, raised $5 million in December.

Metagood and various collectors have taken to Twitter to proclaim that OnChain Monkey represents the first 10,000 NFT project to be minted on Ordinals—a claim that the creators of Bitcoin Punks, a clone of popular Ethereum project CryptoPunks, have also made.