Taproot Wizards
After 2 years the Wizards were finally minted!
TLDR:
Taproot Wizards were announced in February 2023 with the mission to “make Bitcoin magical again” and after 2 years they were finally minted last week.
The wizards want to re-introduce OP_CAT into Bitcoin to give it more programmability, and have done a lot in bringing this issue to the forefront.
Over the past 2 years they raised over $50m from investors and launched a collection called Quantum Cats, while also creating a strong community.
On March 25th they sold the wizards on the whitelist, and the rest were sold on March 27th as a dutch auction. They were incredibly successful raising over $25m!
However, since then the floor price of both Wizards and Cats has collapsed and keeps falling further, only time will tell how well the project will do.
Last week we saw one of the biggest Bitcoin Ordinals projects, the Taproot Wizards, finally release their mint 2 long years after they were originally announced.
The mint was incredibly successful, however they were minted in a moment where the overall market isn’t looking too hot, was this a mistake or not? Today we take a deeper look.
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Taproot Wizards
The Taproot Wizards were created from the minds of Udi Wertheimer and Eric Wall, along with the artist mavensbot, and were first announced back in February 2023 just after the Ordinals protocol was introduced by Casey Rodarmor in January 2023.
Now if you don’t know what Bitcoin Ordinals are I suggest reading this post I wrote back in 2023 about them, however to be succinct they are essentially NFTs on Bitcoin.
The Wizards team historically inscribed their first Wizard #0001, on the Bitcoin blockchain in a 3.96 MB block, the largest inscription ever, pushing the block-size as close as possible to Bitcoin’s 4 MB block limit!
Udi and Eric’s collection was inspired by an old and iconic wizard meme created on the Bitcoin subreddit back in 2013 by mavensbot himself, who’s light hearted artwork is credited with popularising the meme of Bitcoin being “magic internet money”.
Their Ordinals collection was created with 2121 wizards as a nod to Bitcoin’s 21 million coin supply cap, and they put them all on-chain in early inscriptions. They then revealed the collection on February 18th 2023 exactly 10 years after the original meme from the Bitcoin subreddit!
The project’s name itself “Taproot Wizards” is a mix of the “Wizard” meme and the “Taproot” upgrade to Bitcoin that allowed Ordinals to be created in the first place. The wizards were one of the first big Ordinals projects out there, so there’s been a big build up over the past couple of years as people have waited for them to be released.
And last week, after over 2 years since the collection was originally put on-chain, the wizards were finally minted and sent to their new rightful owners!
The project importantly has a deep mission, which is in their words is to "make Bitcoin magical again” and push Bitcoin to be more than just a store of value by upgrading it with an additional operator known as OP_CAT.
OP_CAT
Now a whole post could be written on OP_CAT itself, and maybe I will at some point. But essentially OP_CAT is a Bitcoin Script operator that was removed by Satoshi himself back in 2010 due to security risks.
OP_CAT simply allows two pieces of data to be “concatenated” together within Bitcoin’s simple coding language, for example “OP_CAT ABC XYZ” would produce ABCXYZ. While this sounds basic it’s a powerful building block that would enable more complex logic on Bitcoin.
With OP_CAT developers could create “covenants” in Bitcoin script, that effectively set more interesting limitations and logic on how BTC can be spent. This is essential for Bitcoin L2s and would allow DeFi-like functionality to be built into the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Importantly, the security risks that Satoshi was originally concerned about have already been mitigated by the Taproot upgrade to Bitcoin from 2021, so there’s a very real chance that OP_CAT could make its way back into Bitcoin now.
The potential of this change is huge, we’d see Bitcoin go beyond just being “digital gold” to digital gold with complex programmable capabilities, and its really Taproot Wizard’s team who are responsible for putting re-activation of OP_CAT on the radar.
But upgrades to Bitcoin are slow so its hard to know when this upgrade may happen.
Quantum Cats & Quests
Although the Taproot Wizards team inscribed the Wizards on chain in 2023, they didn’t immediately sell them, in fact they kept leading people on and on for the past couple of years and it seemed like the mint was never going to happen.
In the mean time they raised a seed round of $7.5m and series A round of $30m, meaning they’ve raised a big chunk of money from private investors to help fulfill their vision so far.
They also released a sub-collection known as the “Quantum Cats” as a play on the “OP_CAT” operator that they want to get into Bitcoin. The collection with 3,333 cats minted in February 2024 raising another $13m for the team. In fact I’ve written a post before about the Cats and some of their most interesting properties here:
Over the years the Taproot Wizards project also built out a cult-like community with their “Wizard School” in Discord, keeping people entertained through wacky quests that would eventually earn people the opportunity to mint their very own wizard.
These quests birthed many funny moments like people in Wizard costumes taking cold showers:
And doing other weird things…
There were 5 quests in total and they all culminated with the mint that finally happened last week.
The Mint
After waiting for over 2 years the Taproot Wizard team finally released mint details last month on the 11th March.
The mint price was set to 0.2 BTC (around $16,000) but if you had 2 Quantum Cats you could “entangle” them to get onto the whitelist mint for 0.1 BTC (around $8,000). Also people who’d completed quests could mint for 0.2 BTC. With the remaining wizards being sold in a dutch auction afterwards.
The whitelist mint itself happened on 25th March with many people minting, and a total of 1660 wizards out of 1750 available were minted out!
Some people had to wait as long as 1 hour for their mint to go through because of Bitcoin’s slow block times, and the reveal only happened right at the end, but despite Bitcoin’s limitations the whitelist mint was a success.
The remaining 90 wizards went on sale through a dutch auction on March 27th where the price started at 0.42 BTC and eventually all were sold for 0.31 BTC (around $25k). In a dutch auction it’s the final price that matters, so anyone who paid above 0.31 BTC was returned the remainder meaning the final 90 wizards were sold for 0.31 BTC each.
In the end all Wizards were successfully sold and the project raised over $25m in Bitcoin. By all metrics this was a very successful mint!
Nobody Wants Wizards
There’s been a running joke from Udi and the team that “nobody wants wizards”, the mint website was even called nobodywants.taprootwizards.com. However, perhaps this joke has formed some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.
The Taproot Wizard team certainly picked an odd moment to run their mint considering that the crypto market’s had a bit of a lull due to the macro economic uncertainty that Trump’s introduced. And since the mint we’ve seen Taproot Wizards and Quantum Cats take a big hit on their floor price.
Although 90 Wizards were minted for as much 0.31 BTC, we’re now at around 0.15 BTC per wizard, which is a 50% drop.
Meanwhile the cats have had a staggering drop too to a 0.045 BTC floor, which is pretty bad considering the cats once commanded a floor above 0.3 BTC and right before the mint were around 0.13 BTC each.
It’s honestly not been a good start for the incredibly hyped Taproot Wizards mint.
However, when you consider that they’ve now cummulatively raised over $75m, you’d imagine that there’s still a lot of potential for the project and for where the team might take it. Importnatly we’ve yet to see OP_CAT implemented into Bitcoin, and the wizards are likely steadily building in the background for when that day comes.
Right now it just seems that it’s all because the crypto market’s in a bad place, or perhaps it was indeed a self-fulfilling prophecy that nobody wanted wizards - only time will tell.
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