Two years after they were inscribed on the Bitcoin blockchain, the highly anticipated Taproot Wizards Ordinals collection will go on sale on March 25, the project’s creators announced Tuesday.

Taproot Wizards will consist of 2,121 Wizard NFTs, modeled after the iconic Bitcoin Wizard meme that surfaced on Reddit in 2013.

The collection will be sold in two distinct phases, the first of which will offer Wizard NFTs to those on an allowlist for 0.2 BTC, or $16,340 at today’s prices. An eligibility checker has been launched ahead of the mint.

A second phase will allow the general public to mint a Taproot Wizard NFT via Dutch auction. A representative for the project said that the starting price of the auction would be higher than 0.2 BTC, but that the price wouldn’t be revealed until closer to launch.

Taproot Wizards has been a prominent project in the Bitcoin scene for the last couple years, with the artwork inscribed on the blockchain via the Ordinals protocol back in 2023. However, the creators waited beyond the original Ordinals hype window and pursued other ventures, finally opting to release them this month.

“When Taproot Wizards were inscribed two years ago, the team promised the sale would happen much later, to test the persistence of the real wizards,” project lead Udi Wertheimer told Decrypt. “The price is a simple function of supply and demand. The Wizards are widely considered to be the most anticipated NFT sale in years, but the supply is very limited at 2,121 Wizards. Not everyone will be able to own one.”

In order to qualify for the whitelist, users were asked to participate in a variety of quests, one of which included taking a shower while wearing a wizard costume.

The project will also honor those who own a pair of “entangled” Quantum Cats, an Ordinals collection from the Taproot Wizards team that minted in January 2024. Those who have at least one cat with a “dead” trait and one with an “alive trait” will be able to entangle (or connect) them on the mint website in order to claim their allowlist spot. After, they’ll be able to mint a Taproot Wizard NFT for 0.1 BTC—a 50% discount.

Quantum Cats, which minted for 0.1 BTC, have the highest market cap of any Ordinals collection as of this writing, holding a floor price—or the price of the lowest listed asset on the marketplace—of 0.185 BTC, or about $15,000. 

The project aims to use all funds raised from the Taproot Wizards mint to build out an ecosystem of OP_CAT applications and protocols on Bitcoin. OP_CAT, a Bitcoin protocol feature initially instituted and then disabled by pseudonymous Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, would reopen programmability on the blockchain, allowing for a more robust Bitcoin ecosystem.

Taproot Wizards have been among the prominent voices pushing for OP_CAT to be added back to Bitcoin, potentially unlocking additional functionality and use cases for the chain.

“​​Ordinals kick-started an orange age of Bitcoin innovation. The amount of new startups and projects in Bitcoin absolutely blew up in the last 2 years, and none of it would’ve happened without Ordinals,” Wertheimer told Decrypt. “As attention in Bitcoin shifts away from lobbying and regulatory efforts, we expect innovation and culture to be at the forefront of Bitcoin’s story in the coming years.” 

In February, Taproot Wizards announced it raised a $30 million Series A funding round led by Standard Crypto, in part to continue the pursuit of OP_CAT-related developments. 

But the actual implementation of OP_CAT will still require some work and a soft fork. In a public update posted to X (formerly Twitter), Taproot Wizards co-founder Eric Wall indicated that 2025 is the best chance to “oil the soft fork upgrade machinery,” adding that doing so “is going to require deeper cross-industry collaboration than what we’re normally used to.”

Edited by Andrew Hayward