Bitcoin-Focused Ordinals Project Taproot Wizards Raises $7.5M in Seed Round

Taproot Wizards, a Bitcoin-focused Ordinals project, raised $7.5 million in seed funding to try and “make bitcoin magical again.”

The investment round was led by crypto-focused venture capital firm Standard Crypto, with contributions from Geometry, Collider Ventures, StarkWare, UTXO Management, Bitcoin Frontier Fund, Masterkey and Newman Capital, according to a post on Taproot Wizards’ X account on Thursday.

Taproot Wizards, which describes itself as “magic internet JPEGs”, offers a collection of Microsoft Paint images of wizards harking back to a 2013 bitcoin meme: “magic internet money.”

Co-founder Udi Wertheimer claimed to have mined “the largest block and largest transaction in Bitcoin history,” with the minting of such an image in February.

The Ordinals protocol enables users to inscribe data into satoshis – the smallest units of bitcoin – in effect creating non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the Bitcoin network. The protocol debuted at the start of this year, becoming a divisive issue for the Bitcoin community, with some participants saying they are pointlessly congesting the network.

Nearly 1.9 million inscriptions were uploaded to the blockchain in the two weeks spanning the end of October and the start of November, driving network fees to nearly $7, up some 970% from the start of August.

For such reasons, Ordinals will continue to have its detractors, but Taproot Wizards’ funding round suggests it’s not short of fans either.