Bitcoin Ordinals project Taproot Wizards is opening up their whitelisted Wizards NFT collection to a public auction, according to an announcement on Tuesday. The tokens, which were minted two years ago but never sold, will finally go on offer on March 25.
There are only 2121 “Wizards” in existence, all modeled after a cartoon image that served as an early, unofficial mascot for Bitcoin in its early days. That is, minus the last 13 "honorary" images “that haven’t been inscribed yet and won’t be part of the sale.”
Like the original Bitcoin Wizard meme, created in 2013 by a Reddit user with MS Paint, the collectibles all feature a variation of a berobed wizard wearing a (typically blue) cloak and hat. Peppered throughout the series are homages to Bitcoin culture throughout the years, including Wizards that resemble notable figures like Casa founder Jameson Lopp and Twitter personality Cobie as well as references to McDonald’s, “The Bitcoin Standard” and the tulip bubble.
Taproot Wizards, co-founded by Bitcoin commentators Udi Wertheimer and Eric Wall, is the same team behind the largest Ordinals collection by market capitalization, Quantum Cats. All of their projects attempt to draw attention to the new technical innovations expanding Bitcoin’s functionality — like OP_CAT — and seek to recapture the whimsy of the original “magic internet money.”
Operation code Concatenate (i.e. OP_CAT) is a scripting function that Satoshi Nakamoto included in the original version of Bitcoin’s codebase to enable automated, customizable transactions. The tool was disabled a few months after the blockchain’s launch due to a lack of use cases but has become one of the most promising avenues to bring Ethereum-like capabilities to Bitcoin.
Opcodes are low-level instructions that define the operations that can be performed within a Bitcoin script. Wertheimer previously told The Block OP_CAT is his preferred solution due to its historical legacy and useability (despite its simplicity as it’s just 10 lines of code).
“The cool thing about OPCAT, because it's so flexible,” Wertheimer said. “What I expect is that people are going to create tons of new protocols. Instead of having Ordinels and BRC20s, once per quarter, a new protocol like that shows up like the heydays of Ethereum or Solana, where people create new protocols on a daily basis.”
In February, Taproot Wizards announced a $30 million funding round led by Standard Crypto, which would help finance its support of the OP_CAT ecosystem.
The team opened the Wizard NFT whitelist to members of the "Wizard School" on Discord. Participants could join the pre-public mint by completing “quests” like engaging with Bitcoin’s Lightning Network or taking a picture of a “proof-of-shower” while wearing a wizard costume (which reportedly saw over 1,000 submissions).
These Whitelist Wizards will be sold in an initial tranche for 0.2 BTC, with the remaining assets to be sold in a dutch auction, a method for selling NFTs where the price starts high and decreases over time. Additionally, anyone with two “entangled” Quantum Cats tokens will be offered a discount to buy a Taproot Wizard at 0.1 BTC.
Taproot Wizards’ February 2023 mint of Taproot Wizard #0001 resulted in a 4MB block, Bitcoin’s largest at the time. This particular moment was a lightning rod for critics of Ordinals and alternative Bitcoin use cases due to issues associated with network congestion among Bitcoin maximalists.
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