Christie’s sells it’s first Bitcoin Ordinal made by Ryan Koopmans and Alice Wexell

A digital art piece inscribed on Bitcoin’s Ordinals protocol titled “Ascend” has been sold for $57,450 at Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Art Day, beating it’s low estimate of $39,000.

Ryan Koopmans and Alice Wexell’s Bitcoin Ordinal “Ascend” was sold at a £44,100 or equal to $57,450 on Oct. 10 at Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Art Day sale. The piece was initially estimated to sell at a price of £30,000 or $39,222.

This is the first time that a Bitcoin Ordinal has been featured in a live auction at Christie’s, one of the world’s oldest and most storied auction houses founded in 1776.

The artwork captures the beauty of a revitalized Iveria Sanatorium in Tskaltubo, Georgia. The structure, built between 1952 and 1962, has fallen into ruin and has since been revived through Koopmans and Wexell’s digital work.

“Ascend” is a part of Koopman and Wexell’s “The Wild Within” project, which combines visual photography with 3D technology to bring abandoned structures back to life.

Manager of Digital Art Sales at Christie’s, Sebastian Sanchez, talked about how Bitcoin Ordinals differ from NFTs on Ethereum, presenting a new challenge for artists who seek to create within that realm.

“Ordinals present different constraints such as requiring a much smaller file size than what’s possible on Ethereum, so typically we don’t see a lot of high-quality art. However, artists are working with these constraints and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible,” said Sanchez in an email to crypto.news.

He explained that Ordinals add an extra layer of protection that external databases lack. External servers that become inactive run the risk of permanently deleting the image files stored inside it. Whereas Ordinals attach images and videos onto an individual Satoshi, the smallest unit of Bitcoin, without using external links.

Although there is a downside, as Sanchez believes that Ordinals have a “steeper learning curve” in terms of technicalities compared to NFTs and therefore harder to introduce to the mainstream art community.

Furthermore, he stated that more and more artists are experimenting with digital and physical artworks and combining the two worlds.

“We’ve seen artists create digitally-native work where the owner has the right to receive a signed print from an artist, as well as physical works that have Certificates of Authenticity on the blockchain,” he said.

Both Wexall and Koopmans are no strangers to the worlds of traditional fine art and photography.

On Sept. 2024, artworks from their acclaimed digital art series called “The Wild Within” were installed in the former Royal Villa of Durres at the first International Biennale of Contemporary Art in Durres, Albania.

Another one of their artworks “‘The Thought of You” was created based off of an abandoned villa in Italy. The piece was showcased at Enter Art Fair in Copenhagen, Denmark from Aug. 29 until Sept. 1.