The NFT market hasn't collapsed at all: it's just that buyers are moving away from Ethereum artworks in favor of drawings on the Bitcoin platform Ordinals. Earlier in October last year, online portal Business Insider published an article saying a report by dappGambl based on data provided by NFT Scan and CoinMarketCap showed back then that out of 73,257 active NFT collections, 69,795, or slightly over 95%, had a market cap of zero ETH.

According to a widely discussed online publication, a digital art image of Genesis Cat, created by the Taproot Wizards project team as an NFT on the Ordinals protocol, sold for $254,000 at a Sotheby's auction.

The auction for the lots started on the 12th and ended on January 22nd. The NFT sale price exceeded the original asking price in the $15,000—20,000 range, by about 12X. The auction also included 19 other Ordinals inscriptions, collectively bringing in around $1.1 million.

Digital art of so-called Genesis Cat is part of a series of 3,333 non-interchangeable Quantum Cats tokens. The series was released by the Taproot Wizards team — after raising $7.5 million in investor funds for their NFT project on Bitcoin.