Original | Odaily Planet Daily
Author | Nanzhi
On November 16, Ordinals project Taproot Wizards announced that it had successfully raised $7.5 million, led by Standard Crypto, with participation from Geometry, Collider Ventures, StarkWare, UTXO Management, Bitcoin Frontier Fund, Masterkey and Newman Capital, at an undisclosed valuation. It is reported that this round of funds will be used to rebuild Bitcoin's "Wizard Village", symbolizing the desire to compete with major blockchains such as Ethereum and Solana.
The first Taproot Wizards were engraved on the Bitcoin network on February 2, with founder Udi Wertheimer saying: "(Wizard) Mint created the largest block (LARGEST BLOCK) and the largest transaction (LARGEST TRANSACTION) in the history of Bitcoin."
In August of this year, in response to reports that "Bitcoin Ordinals NFT trading volume has dropped 98% since May", Eric Wall, one of the founders of Taproot Wizards, said: "I admit that Ordinals is a huge failure. I am willing to double refund everyone who purchased the Taproot Wizards project. You can keep the jpeg (no need to return the NFT). Private messages are now open." Of course, this is more of an irony, but it also reveals the deserted Ordinals market in August.
Odaily Planet Daily will detail the past and present of Taproot Wizards and its subsequent development plans.
Taproot Wizards
From ten years ago
On February 19, 2013, the administrator of the r/Bitcoin section of Reddit published a post, soliciting the public for an image to be used as a promotional banner for subreddits.
1 hour and 1 minute later, a user named mavensbot posted the "Wizard" picture, which quickly became the focus of the community with its "abstract" style.
The price of Bitcoin on that day was only $29.6; two months later (April 10), it hit a record high of $266 in the first half of 2013, and on November 30 of that year, it hit a high of $1,156 for the year.
Also in November 2013, a character similar to the "wizard" created by mavensbot appeared in the seventh episode of the seventeenth season of the American adult animated television series "South Park".
Wizards of all sizes
On February 2, Udi Wertheimer announced the engraving of the Taproot Wizards NFT series, with a block size of 3.96 MB, approaching the maximum block limit of 4 MB.
This series is a re-creation of the original picture by Udi Wertheimer and Erica Wall (the brother who promised a refund in the previous article), and the co-developers also include the Bitcoin mining company Luxor, which has ignited the popularity of Ordinals to a certain extent. This series is called "Big Wizard", and there is no sales plan for it yet. It has been whitelisted for the Little Wizard series.
On February 18, on the 10th anniversary of the wizard’s promotional image, mavensbot released the Bitcoin Wizard’s NFT series, with a total of 1,337 pieces. He was called “little wizard” by community users. In addition, the related token $WZRD was later issued.
The Wizard Village Project
When Tech Crunch reported on Taproot Wizards’ financing, Taproot Wizards said the funds would be used to rebuild Bitcoin’s wizard village, but did not elaborate. In the report of BITCOIN MAGAZINE, there is the following explanation:
"We are seeking a larger seed round of $7.5 million because we feel time is of the essence," said Udi Wertheimer, co-founder of Taproot Wizards. "We have been bullish on Bitcoin for a decade, but we truly believe now is the best time to invest in Bitcoin."
Taproot Wizards aims to assemble a strong development team to further develop tools and applications that fully exploit the potential of the open source protocol. The project's mission is to maximize the potential of Taproot, an upgrade designed to enhance Bitcoin privacy, security, and efficiency.
Wertheimer further stated: “We are focused on achieving the best breakthroughs in broader crypto research to advance Bitcoin and Ordinals, such as the open source rollup work we shared a few months ago, and will use this funding to build a top Bitcoin development team.”
Taproot Wizards’ focus is to foster an ecosystem where developers can collaborate and create solutions that harness the power of Bitcoin. The project aims to open up new applications, increase scalability, and strengthen Bitcoin’s security infrastructure.
Lead investor Standard Crypto co-founder Alok Vasudev said: "We not only find Bitcoin NFTs very attractive as assets; we also believe that the Ordinals movement has the opportunity to reignite innovation in Bitcoin on a broader scale - we believe this is necessary for Bitcoin to realize its full potential. While managing an important NFT collection and its community is valuable in itself, we believe that Taproot Wizards has a greater opportunity to use its brand as a distribution channel for new Bitcoin infrastructure."
As the Bitcoin industry continues to evolve, Taproot Wizards strives to encourage builders to expand new possibilities within the Bitcoin space, leveraging Taproot upgrades as a foundation for innovation and growth.
