Taproot Wizards Debut Sale of Bitcoin NFTs ‘Quantum Cats’ Marred by Tech Issues
The sale of a debut assortment of “Quantum Cats” Bitcoin inscriptions by Ordinals challenge Taproot Wizards was marred by technical points on Monday.
The deliberate sale of round 3,000 digital cats, designed to honor a Bitcoin enchancment proposal often known as OP_CAT, commenced with a two-hour “whitelist” window at 17:00 UTC Monday, however this needed to be postponed till Tuesday because of the points encountered.
“There’s been an unbelievable demand for the cats in the present day, and our servers merely couldn’t deal with the quantity of people that had been attempting to mint,” Taproot Wizards posted on X, including that 30% of the cats had been bought. This might equate to round 90 BTC ($3.9 million).
The gathering was on sale for 0.1 BTC ($4,300), which means as a lot as 300 BTC ($12.9 million) may have been raised if each cat was to be bought.
It was an inauspicious begin for Taproot Wizards, which raised $7.5 million in a seed funding spherical in November to advance its Ordinals-focused initiatives.
Udi Wertheimer, one of many firm’s co-founders, apologized to would-be consumers throughout a dwell Areas session on the social-media platform X.
“There’s been some glitches,” Wertheimer stated. “I do know this is not the expertise individuals had been anticipating.”
Following the two-hour whitelist window, the plan was for minting to pause for an hour earlier than the remaining cats grew to become out there for basic sale.
Complaints crammed the challenge’s Discord channel on Monday: “This has acquired to be one of many worst mint experiences I’ve ever seen,” one person wrote.
The Ordinals protocol permits the inscriptions of information into satoshis – the smallest items of bitcoin – successfully creating non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the Bitcoin community. The protocol debuted in the beginning of 2023, changing into a contentious difficulty for the Bitcoin group, with some customers saying they’re pointlessly congesting the community.
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