Bitcoin ordinals startup Taproot Wizards hires CTO after seed raise

The pseudonymous Rijndael’s hiring comes as bitcoin ordinals spurred a takeoff in bitcoin transaction fees over recent weeks

article-image

Source: Taproot Wizards

share

Taproot Wizards, the bitcoin ordinals startup that announced a $7.5 million round led by Standard Crypto last week, is bringing on the pseudonymous developer Rijndael as its chief technology officer.

Co-founded by Udi Wertheimer and Eric Wall, Taproot Wizards is a generative art collection inscribed with bitcoin ordinals, a recent add-on to the network that lets data be inscribed as NFTs and other digital collectibles. 

Bitcoin ordinals have seen a November spike in popularity, spurring nearly $30 million in transaction fees since Nov. 4, per Blockworks Research. Largely due to blockspace demand created by ordinals, bitcoin transaction fees have become more expensive than Ethereum’s for the first time in three years.

Read more: Ethereum won’t flip Bitcoin anytime soon, but Ordinals could change that

Before coming to Taproot Wizards, Rijndael says he worked as the technical lead at Amazon’s NFT project and more recently on Bitkey’s self-custody wallet. 

In an X thread announcing the career move, Rijndael lamented the inability for “less-dogmatic Bitcoiners” to take part in the bitcoin community “without picking up a very particular set of puritan values.”

“The Ordinals ecosystem has a real opportunity to expand what we think of as Bitcoin culture, and give more kinds of people an opportunity to connect with a Bitcoin that they can relate to,” Rijndael wrote

Read more: Avalanche gets the ‘Ordinals’ bump, sets new transaction record

The incoming CTO also said he’s looking to hire a full-stack engineer.

Taproot Wizards plans to mint 2,121 of its NFTs, which are variations of a Microsoft Paint drawing of a wizard posted to Reddit to promote bitcoin a decade ago.

Generative NFT projects like Taproot Wizards have been among crypto’s most successful to date. Bored Apes and CryptoPunks are the second and third-highest selling NFT collections ever, according to CryptoSlam, with both being stored on the Ethereum blockchain.


Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:

Tags

Decoding crypto and the markets. Daily, with Byron Gilliam.

Upcoming Events

Old Billingsgate

Mon - Wed, October 13 - 15, 2025

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

recent research

Flashnote Template (41).png

Research

We believe that few tokens at the application layer are diverging more from fundamentals than ZORA. Its fully-diluted P/S sits at 90x, pricing significant growth despite a consistent decline in weekly revenues since late July. We foresee an 80% decrease in protocol net margins due to a recent update to the fee structure that reduces trading fees from 3% to 1%, while boosting creators’ portion of the fee split. ZORA’s supply overhang also represents a near-term headwind, with 45% of ZORA’s supply (4.5B tokens or $350M at current prices) earmarked for the team & investors beginning to unlock on October 23, 2025 (36-month linear vesting schedule).

article-image

Insiders have the best information — markets should be willing to pay for it

article-image

The CFTC-regulated exchange is opening doors to crypto builders and traders through grants, partnerships, and new deposit options

by Blockworks /
article-image

DFS tells banking organizations to integrate blockchain monitoring tools to curb money laundering and sanctions risks

by Blockworks /
article-image

New short and long-term priorities include L1 gas boosts, ZK-EVMs, privacy reads, and a lean, quantum-resistant Ethereum

by Blockworks /
article-image

The new stBTC token redistributes Bitcoin gas fees to users, creating liquid yield without inflation or lockups

by Blockworks /
article-image

The reserve will collect protocol revenues to back W token, alongside new yield and unlock schedule

by Blockworks /