Taproot Wizards Pioneers Bitcoin Ordinals Trend, Secures $7.5 Million in Funding

Taproot Wizards, one of the pioneering projects in the Bitcoin Ordinals space, has successfully raised $7.5 million.

Taproot Wizards Pioneers Bitcoin Ordinals Trend, Secures $7.5 Million in Funding

In an announcement posted on the evening of November 16, Taproot Wizards revealed that it had completed a seed funding round, raising $7.5 million. The project aims to further advance the Bitcoin Ordinals trend and enhance the functionality of the world's largest cryptocurrency network.

The funding round saw participation from several prominent crypto funds, including Standard Crypto, Geometry, Collider Ventures, StarkWare, UTXO Management, Bitcoin Frontier Fund, Masterkey, and Newman Capital.

Taproot Wizards is among the first projects to embrace the Bitcoin Ordinals trend, which emerged early in 2023. The project is a collection of NFTs on Bitcoin, featuring the "Bitcoin Wizard" meme that dates back to 2013.

The project's founder, Udi Wertheimer, released the first Taproot Wizards NFT in February 2023, creating the largest Bitcoin block in history, as reported by Coin68.

Taproot Wizards plans to release a limited total of 2,121 NFTs, symbolizing Bitcoin’s total supply of 21 million BTC. However, to date, the project has only allocated 20 NFTs to the community, less than 1% of the total supply. The project asserts that none of these NFTs have been distributed to the aforementioned investors.

In the near future, Taproot Wizards intends to reward NFTs to active members of the "Wizard School" community who demonstrate strong support for Bitcoin.

Udi Wertheimer stated:

“We’ve been with Bitcoin for over a decade. We remember its early days. Everything was experimental, but now it’s different. We want to bring back the culture of building with Bitcoin and make it 'magical' once again.”

Since early November, the number of Ordinals transactions on Bitcoin has surged, with total inscriptions exceeding 40 million this week. The resurgence of Ordinals has also driven BTC transaction fees to their highest level since May 2023, with over 320,000 transactions pending in the mempool.

Ordinals Transaction Volume Over Time. Source: Dune Analytics (17/11/2023)

The renewed interest in Ordinals has been fueled by Binance listing ORDI, one of the BRC-20 tokens created through Bitcoin Ordinals, on November 7. Since then, the ORDI token price has continuously risen, hitting a new ATH of $27.8 on November 16, nearly five times its listing price.

4H Chart of ORDI/USDT on Binance at 08:55 AM on 17/11/2023