ordinals

For the next 10 days, I’m going to be dropping threads on the current state of ordinals, starting today with the Pre-Runes projects 🧵

Yesterday I posted my thread on the Pre-Runes. Today starts a series on projects that have taken the early lead in becoming the “Blue Chip” collections of Ordinals. I’m starting with the project that I use as my pfp, Quantum Cats from the Taproot Wizards. As always, not financial advice and do your own research!

This is a strange case of where the secondary collection from a project was released before the primary one. When Ordinals were starting, founders Udi Wertheimer and @ercwl were some of the most vocal about Ordinals. They even inscribed a Taproot Wizards meme that took up basically all of the space of an entire block.

BizDev /poap (was POAP guy at /farcon), Co-Founder Blockchain Beach, Bitcoin Ordinals investor since Feb ‘23 

Udi had been bearish on NFTs on ETH, but saw Taproot Wizards as a way to improve Bitcoin in ways that the “lazer eyed maxis” had failed. Fans of the project started doing quests to earn a Taproot Wizard, like taking a shower in a wizard costume and sending money to charity using the lightning network.

While Taproot Wizards are still only distributed to the team and to some Bitcoin OG VIPs via honoraries, the team shifted focus to an upgrade to Bitcoin, OP_CAT. OP_CAT was eight lines of code that were originally part of Bitcoin’s codebase, but was removed along with a large number of of OP codes early on.

Taproot Wizards and a few others have been studying OP_CAT and believe that it us not only safe to reintroduce, but will be a game changer for making more fun things possible with Bitcoin. They released Quantum Cats as a way to educate the space about OP_CAT, as explaining it in a fun way was one way to earn WL.

Quantum Cats have two states, Alive and Dead, each making up half of the collection. Owning both an alive and dead cat gives you the “Entangled” Role in Discord and many are guessing that owning one of each will help to earn Taproot Wizards WL one day.

Not only that, the Quantum Cats are an evolving inscription. Each of the cats has evolved once, plus two cats have evolved to reveal a golden cape, which guarantees WL for Taproot Wizards. The first of the two golden capes was auctioned off by Sotheby’s for $254,000.

The community is very strong and owning a Quantum Cat has allowed for side quests in the mission of activating OP_CAT. Other than a few notable drops, there are not many opportunities for whitelist raffles, but if you want your best shot at eventually earning a Taproot Wizard, you’ll probably want a Quantum Cat.

Quantum Cats originally sold for .1 BTC, with the price now sitting between .25-.3 BTC on any given day. 

As always, not financial advice and do your own research!