You may have noticed that Yuga Labs, the company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and the CryptoPunks, is launching an NFT collection on Bitcoin. As of early 2023, it will be possible to publish NFTs on Bitcoin using the Ordinals protocol. Yuga Labs does not miss that opportunity, but there is now criticism of the company.
Critique of Yuga Labs
Yuga Labs launched a collection of 300 NFTs on the Bitcoin blockchain, of which 288 are already for sale. Today the auction of these digital “artworks” from Yuga Labs ends.
The company is mainly criticized for the way in which they have set up the auction process. Interested parties are forced to immediately send the full amount in Bitcoin they want to offer to Yuga Labs.
If you are ultimately not the highest bidder, Yuga Labs will manually return the Bitcoin in question. “We are still in the stone age,” said Giancarlo, an NFT influencer, on Twitter.
Bad example
That’s not the only criticism of Yuga Labs’ approach. The user behind the Bitcoin Ordinals-focused account “ordinally” calls the auction a “scammers dream.” While he doesn’t believe Yuga Labs won’t return Bitcoin to losers, he says this isn’t the way it should be.
After all, it may well be that scammers will be inspired by this and people will see this as the standard way to organize auctions on Bitcoin. If that happens, there is a good chance that people will be scammed in the future.
The brain behind Bitcoin Ordinals, as witnessed by the tweet above, is also not very happy with the way Yuga Labs is launching this collection. In fact, he lashes out at the NFT company in the message.