Ordinals Fees Spike as Bored Ape Yacht Club Clones Bloom on Bitcoin

Daily transaction fees for minting Bitcoin Ordinals inscriptions reached a new all-time high on Thursday of 9.28 BTC, around $257,460, according to a Dune Analytics report.

The surge is largely attributed to Bitcoin Apes, a variation of the popular Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection that is being reproduced on the Bitcoin Network.

Since the launch of the Ordinals project in January 2023, over $3.3 million in fees have been paid to put images, text, and even video games on the original blockchain.

“[Bitcoin Apes] follow the same logic as Bitcoin Punks where the first byte-perfect image of a Bored Ape that is inscribed is the real one,” pseudonymous NFT historian Leonidas told Decrypt on Twitter. “8,397 Bitcoin Apes have already been inscribed, and once they have minted out, over $1M will have been spent inscribing the 10,000 exact copies of the Bored Ape Yacht Club images onto Bitcoin.”

Of the 466 GB of data that makes up the Bitcoin blockchain, Leonidas says that over 1GB is now images of monkeys.

“In a weird way this is actually really good for Bitcoin,” Leonidas said. “Every extra transaction fee that is being paid to inscribe these apes is helping to secure the Bitcoin network by giving miners an additional revenue source to supplement the block rewards.”

Leonidas believes projects like Bitcoin Apes may be the solution to the long-standing question of what to do after the pre-programmed Bitcoin block rewards eventually go to zero in 2140.

But while JPEGs are becoming more popular on the Bitcoin Network, most Ordinal Inscriptions are text-based, according to Dune.

“The Bitcoin Apes do not compete with the original Bored Ape Yacht Club collection,” Leonidas said. “In fact, several of the people I have talked to who are inscribing are big fans of the original collection and would love to hold one of the original Bored Apes someday.”

Leonidas says it was inevitable that the culture behind one of the most iconic NFT collections would spread to other blockchains, and that Bitcoin Apes confirm that trend.

Some Bored Ape Yacht Club owners are concerned that copies of their NFTs are being created and traded on the Bitcoin blockchain. However, Leonidas believes such concerns are unwarranted.

“Blockchains solve the problem of provenance for digital art so there is no debate about whether the official Bored Ape Yacht Club holders are the holders of the original and Bored Apes—anybody can verify that ownership on-chain,” Leonidas explained. “This is just another derivative project of an iconic PFP collection that in my opinion just spreads the culture of the original PFP collection to even more people which ends up driving value back down to the official holders.”

“People are actually doing the original Bored Ape Yacht Club holders a favor by storing all 10,000 images fully on-chain for the first time so that they will live on forever on Bitcoin at zero cost to the official holders or Yuga,” Leonidas said.

While holders of Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs may not be paying to inscribe their digital collectibles on Bitcoin, the floor price of Bitcoin Apes is steadily rising.

The floor price for Bitcoin Apes is 0.0101 BTC, around $285.00; on Ordinals Wallet, the floor price is 0.21 ETH, around $380.00 on Ordinals Market. Bored Ape Yacht Club Ethereum NFT, in comparison, has a floor price of 57.5 ETH, around $104,036 on OpenSea.