Quantum Cats

Unravelling one of Bitcoin Ordinals' major collections

TLDR:

• Quantum Cats are a collection released by the Taproot Wizards team, one of the OG teams building on Bitcoin Ordinals.

• Quantum Cats make intelligent use of recursive inscriptions, these are inscriptions that reference other inscriptions on Bitcoin.

• The main code responsible for the cats references 40 other inscriptions, but only 12 have been used, this means there’s 28 possible new evolutions to come.

• Cat #0396 is an example of this evolution, it got a new “cape” attribute on Feb 5th from a new inscription. We’ll have to wait to see what other evolutions will come.

Last week Ordinals Maxi Biz (OMBs) shot up in floor price to over 1.7 BTC ($120k)! They’ve come back down to around 1.2 BTC since.

This made me look at Ordinals, admittedly I haven’t paid enough attention to them even though I wrote about them over 1 year ago when they first came onto the scene.

As I started looking more into Ordinals I fell into a bit of a rabbit hole with inscriptions, in particular with Quantum Cats, and today I decided to share what I learned about them.

Taproot Wizards

Ordinals Maxi Biz (OMBs) have been stealing the Bitcoin Ordinals limelight recently and honestly look really cool and punky, which fits with the Bitcoin ethos of going against the system.

However before OMBs stole the scene any mention of Ordinals was immediately connected to the Taproot Wizards and Udi Wertheimer who kept pushing the narrative of turning Bitcoin into something beyond it’s financial side, to therefore bring a little more fun back to the most important blockchain in crypto.

Taproot Wizards are named after the Taproot upgrade on Bitcoin that together with the SegWit upgrade allowed Casey Rodarmor to create Ordinals and create Bitcoin NFTs as we know now them today.

Over 2100 Taproot Wizards were inscribed on inscription 652 and beyond, and they can all be found here on Ord.io.

Yet although they’ve already been inscribed, as of today they still haven’t been released! The creators have been making people grind whitelist for ages with people going as far as doing silly tasks such as taking a shower fully dressed as a wizard!

This incessant grinding without releasing the Wizards may one day come to bite them, as OMBs for example have been growing in visibility and respect for over 1 year since they were released back in Febuary 2023.

Yet, although we still haven’t seen any wizards in the wild, they have a secondary collection known as the Quantum Cats that were released last month in Febuary ‘24.

Quantum Cats

Quantum Cats are the first mint from the Taproot Wizards team for 0.1 BTC on 5th February (originally it was 29th of January but it got postponed). As the Taproot Wizards have commanded a lot of attention and hype from the start of Ordinals, it was pretty obvious the cats would sell out immediately.

The Quantum Cats collection is very wacky and unique, it has a distinct art style that makes it immediately noticeable.

At first glance these are cute cats that play with the idea of Schrodinger’s cat. A theoretical experiment that claims that if you put a cat in a box with poison he is both simultaneously dead and alive until you open the box and check his state. This idea is used to illustrate how particles in the quantum world behave.

The Quantum Cats have traits inspired from this idea, for example they can either be dead or alive, which is shown by their eyes either having crosses or not. Plus they have “phase shifts” describing their state.

Unsurprisingly they’ve already become one of the most important collections on Bitcoin because of their association with Taproots Wizards and the potential for getting a Wizard when they eventually are released.

However, it wasn’t clear how the team would connect up the cats with the wizards until recently, when on the 5th March one of the cats, cat #0396, sprouted a cape!

Now the whole point of Inscriptions on Bitcoin is that they are immutable and cannot be changed, so this cat changing left me puzzled and curious to look deeper!

Inscriptions and Recursion

I’ve already explained in my post last year on Ordinals how inscriptions work, but essentially it works by pushing a blob of data onto a the Bitcoin blockchain and associating it with an individual satoshi.

Since this blob of data is stored on the Bitcoin blockchain it’s immutable and cannot be changed. Which is different for example to an NFT on Ethereum that uses a smart contract, which have variables that can be edited by calling a function on the contract, and can therefore change the metadata of an NFT for example.

In the example of Taproot Wizards the data inscribed for each NFT is literally just a JPEG, as is the case with most Ordinals inscriptions like OMBs for example.

However, more recently the Ordinals community started inscribing code on-chain and came up with a concept called “recursion”. Recursion essentially means one inscription can reference another and that creates the possibility for a lot more complexity as you don’t need to fit everything into a single maximum 4MB block.

With recursion a chunk of code in one inscription can call through to another chunk of code in a separate inscription, allowing all sorts of libraries of code and complex software to be stored on-chain.

Pizza Ninjas for example inscribed a SNES emulator on Bitcoin that’s referenced in their NFT, and more recently they’ve even inscribed a Nintendo64 emulator!

But how do the Quantum Cats use this?

Layers

When you take a look at the inscription of an individual Quantum Cat such as the cat with the cape #0396 you see there’s not much going on. There’s just a script with number of the cat and a link to another inscription.

Jumping through into this second inscription, number 53786861, we start to see how the magic works. This second inscription it links to is essentially the actual code used to generate the Quantum Cat.

I had ChatGPT work alongside me here and the first thing I did was make this code human readable. As I looked into it I found that fundamentally the code loads layers and displays them, and it references 40 other inscriptions for these layers.

Each layer is in fact a JSON file with a hash of the data, which is encoded and unpacked in the previous inscription. An example of this is in this layer below, inscription 63348701.

So in fact each cat is essentialy a number like #0396 with a function that takes that number and searches through all the layers in different inscriptions to find the attributes the cat should have!

Missing Inscriptions

As I went through though I realised that out of the 40 referenced inscriptions only 12 of those inscriptions actually exist!

There’s 28 inscription numbers that don’t actually lead anywhere, and searching for them is a dead end as it appears that they haven’t been inscribed yet.

And interestingly one of these inscriptions references only cat #0396, the cat with the cape, and was inscribed on the 5th February, inscription 63348701, meaning it’s this inscription that made the cat magically get it’s cape!

This leads me to guess that the remaining 28 inscriptions that have already been hardcoded are sort of “slots” for other layers that will at some point reference an inscription that’s yet to be inscribed.

It also means there’s up to 28 sequential alterations that can be done. In each of these alterations we could see a change to as little as 1 cat (as with #0396 and it’s cape) or literally all the cats in the collection. It’s certainly clear the cats will keep evolving!

There’s so much that can still happen, but importantly it’s all been predefined because those 28 inscriptions referenced have already had their IDs set from the start.

The most puzzling and curious thing for me is that somehow the Taproot Wizards team must have found a way to force an inscription to have a specific Inscription ID as they’ve set these predefined IDs on-chain already. This seems odd to me because incription IDs are a function of the inscription number, which you have literally no control over, and the transaction hash, which you also have no control over!

I’m left curious to learn how the Taproot team have managed to figure out a way of manipulating and controlling the inscription ID before inscribing.

All in all going through this process didn’t bring me any closer to knowing which cat will have the next Cape (which I hoped it will), but it did make me learn a bit more about Ordinals and how they can work, and I hope it’s done the same for you!