Over the weekend, a Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFT was burned by its owner, Jason Williams, as a symbolic move to transfer its underlying blockchain from Ethereum to Bitcoin.
The Ape, #1626, was previously sold for 108 Ethereum or nearly $432,000 in November 2021, and its recent burning means it cannot be traded on Ethereum’s network again.
NFTs are unique digital assets that signify ownership of a specific item, often in the form of digital art, with the ownership recorded on the Ethereum network.
The act of permanently removing a digital token from circulation is called “burning,” which Williams performed on his Ape, #1626, using a newly developed feature called Teleburn by Ordinals.
Teleburn enables content such as images and videos to be assigned to individual satoshis, the smallest unit that Bitcoin can be divided into, and permanently exist on Bitcoin’s network as inscriptions.
This new feature allows users to transfer existing assets from another network to a Bitcoin Inscription, thereby transferring the token between chains.
Although there are few marketplaces for trading Inscriptions, the number of buyers and sellers is growing on Ordinal’s discord server.
The burning of BAYC #1626 was not the first use of Teleburn, as Casey Rodarmor and Rob Hamilton had previously tested the function on an ENS domain.
After Williams expressed interest in burning his Ape, Hamilton approached Rodarmor to develop the Teleburn function to enable the transfer.
Burning BAYC #1626 was a symbolic move to move the asset’s underlying blockchain from Ethereum to Bitcoin, with Williams believing his Ape now exists on Bitcoin.
Despite the lack of notable marketplaces for trading inscriptions on Bitcoin, this move could pave the way for more transfers between networks in the future.
