‘Scammers dream’ — Yuga’s auction model for Bitcoin NFTs sees criticism

cointelegraph.com:

Nonfungible token (NFT) conglomerate Yuga Labs is facing some criticism from the cryptocurrency community, including the creator of Bitcoin Ordinals, over how it plans to auction its new Bitcoin NFT collection. 

On Mar. 5, Yuga opened bids for its “TwelveFold” collection which will see 300 NFT-like images inscribed on Satoshis using the Bitcoin-native Ordinals protocol, with 288 from the collection sent to the highest 288 bidders.

The auction for TwelveFold has begun and will conclude on the block immediately prior to 3pm PT tomorrow, March 6th, 2023. Good luck.https://t.co/gvl8IHpekC pic.twitter.com/xGWU9jdCoO

According to a Mar. 5 press release, those participating in the bidding process will be required to send their entire bid amount in BTC to a unique BTC address controlled by Yuga. Winners would simply pay up the BTC they bid, while Yuga said it would return the BTC to those unsuccessful in placing a top bid.

Such a plan however has earned the ire of some within the crypto community, with some pointing out that having to manually conduct refunds for unsuccessful bids is like the “stone age.”

so the way yugas auction will work tomorrow is everyone sends Bitcoin to one wallet and if you lose the bid they promise to manually send it back likely tens of millions of dollarswe’re still in the stone age

The user behind an Ordinals-focused Twitter account “ordinally” called the auction model a “scammers dream” and added while they doubt Yuga would keep the BTC from failed bids, the way it carried out the auction sets a “REALLY bad precedence.”

Yuga is establishing REALLY bad precedence running an auction like this. They are taking custody of bidders’ bitcoin with a promise to send back unsuccessful bids. Not doubting they’ll do