Taproot Wizards will hold the first public auction of the 'Wizards' BTC ordinal project.

The Block reports: BTC Ordinals project Taproot Wizards is selling its Wizards Non-fungible Token collectibles to the public.

According to Tuesday's announcement, the first batch of whitelisted assets will be sold at a price of 0.2 BTC, and the remaining tokens will be sold through a Dutch auction. These tokens were minted two years ago but have not been sold, and are scheduled to officially go live on March 25th.

There are currently only 2121 existing Wizards, all of which are based on the cartoon images of the early BTC unofficial mascot. It is worth noting that the last 13 'honor' images have not been engraved and will therefore not be included in this sale.

These collectibles are similar to the original BTC Wizard meme created by a Reddit user in MS Paint in 2013, with all collectibles featuring wizards in robes, typically with blue cloaks and hats. The series also includes nods to BTC culture, including wizards resembling Casa founder Jameson Lopp and Twitter personality Cobie, as well as references to McDonald's, 'The BTC Standard,' and the tulip bubble.

Taproot Wizards was co-founded by BTC commentators Udi Wertheimer and Eric Wall. The team is also responsible for the most market-capitalized Ordinals collection Quantum Cats. All projects are aimed at drawing attention to new technological innovations that enhance BTC functionality, such as OP_CAT, and attempting to recapture the wonders of the original 'magic internet money'.

OP_CAT

OP_CAT is a scripting feature that was originally incorporated into the BTC codebase by Satoshi Nakamoto to enable automated and customizable transactions. The tool was disabled a few months after the blockchain launch due to a lack of use cases, but is now seen as one of the most promising avenues to bring Ethereum-like capabilities to BTC.

OpCode is a low-level instruction that defines executable operations in BTC scripts. Wertheimer told The Block that he prefers OP_CAT because of its historical legacy and availability (even though it consists of only 10 lines of code).

Wertheimer said, "The flexibility of OP_CAT is what sets it apart. I expect people to create a plethora of new protocols. Rather than having Ordinels and BRC20 appear quarterly, it would be better to have new protocols emerge daily, like the golden age of Ethereum or Solana."

In February this year, Taproot Wizards announced a $30 million financing round led by Standard Crypto, which will help support the OP_CAT ecosystem.

Sales details

The team has opened the Wizard Non-fungible Token whitelist to members of the 'Wizard School' on Discord. Participants can join the pre-public minting event by completing 'tasks', such as interacting with the lightning network of BTC or taking photos of themselves in wizard costumes as 'bath proof' (allegedly received over 1000 submissions).

These whitelist wizards will be sold at a price of 0.2 BTC, and the remaining assets will be sold through a Dutch auction. In addition, anyone holding two 'Entangled' Quantum Cats tokens will enjoy a discount to purchase Taproot Wizard at 0.1 BTC.

Taproot Wizards produced Taproot Wizard #0001 in February 2023, generating a 4MB block, which was the largest block for BTC at the time. This moment became a focal point for Ordinals and alternative BTC use case critics due to concerns from BTC extremists about network congestion.