On November 16th, Taproot Wizards announced the conclusion of its seed funding round, raising $7.5 million from investors such as Standard Crypto, Geometry, Collider Ventures, StarkWare, UTXO Management, Bitcoin Frontier Fund, Masterkey, and Newman Capital.
With this funding, the project aims to continue promoting the Bitcoin Ordinals trend and enhancing the utility of the Bitcoin network. Taproot Wizards is a pioneer in the Bitcoin Ordinals movement that emerged in early 2023. It is a collection of NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) on the Bitcoin network inspired by the “Bitcoin Wizard” meme from 2013.
The first NFTs in the Taproot Wizards collection were released in February 2023 and were founded by Udi Wertheimer. Notably, this collection became the largest block ever on the Bitcoin blockchain, with a size of 4 MB, four times the usual 1 MB limit.
The Taproot Wizards collection comprises 2,121 NFTs, symbolizing the total supply of 21 million BTC in Bitcoin. However, since its launch, only 20 NFTs have been released to the community, accounting for less than 1% of the total supply. The project has stated that NFTs are not allocated to any mentioned investors.
In the coming period, Taproot Wizards announced that it will reward NFTs to active members of the “Wizard School” community and those who demonstrate strong support for Bitcoin.
Since the beginning of November, the number of Ordinals transactions on Bitcoin has seen renewed growth, with the total inscription volume surpassing 40 million this week. The resurgence of Ordinals has also driven BTC transaction fees to their highest levels since May 2023, with over 320,000 transactions pending in the mempool.
One of the reasons for the renewed attention on Ordinals is Binance’s announcement of the listing of ORDI, one of the BRC-20 tokens created through Bitcoin Ordinals. The price of the ORDI token has since seen continuous growth, reaching a new all-time high of $27.8 on November 16th, nearly five times its initial listing price.
At the time of writing, ORDI is trading around $25.9 USD.