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.


Start your day with top crypto insights from David Canellis and Katherine Ross. Subscribe to the Empire newsletter.

Explore the growing intersection between crypto, macroeconomics, policy and finance with Ben Strack, Casey Wagner and Felix Jauvin. Subscribe to the Forward Guidance newsletter.

Get alpha directly in your inbox with the 0xResearch newsletter — market highlights, charts, degen trade ideas, governance updates, and more.

The Lightspeed newsletter is all things Solana, in your inbox, every day. Subscribe to daily Solana news from Jack Kubinec and Jeff Albus.

Tags

Upcoming Events

Javits Center North | 445 11th Ave

Tues - Thurs, March 18 - 20, 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.

Brooklyn, NY

TUES - THURS, JUNE 24 - 26, 2025

Permissionless IV serves as the definitive gathering for crypto’s technical founders, developers, and builders to come together and create the future.If you’re ready to shape the future of crypto, Permissionless IV is where it happens.

recent research

LTIPPanalysis.png

Research

This report is a retroactive analysis of Arbitrum's Long Term Incentives Pilot Program (LTIPP). We collect relevant data at a protocol level and review bi-weekly updates to analyze recipients, their strategies, and the impact of the incentives on high level growth metrics. In particular, we want to highlight outperformers and underperformers, and glean any best practices or lessons learned for protocols distributing ARB incentives in the future. The overarching goal is to synthesize lessons learned that the DAO can reference as it begins thinking about future incentives programs–namely, the working group for incentives that is being actively discussed–especially as Timeboost introduces new conditions for trading and economic activity.

article-image

Sponsored

AI project Zerebro intersects the spheres of artificial intelligence, finance, art, music, and culture

article-image

Allmight is focused on furthering the United States’ leadership in crypto

article-image

The conditions Charles Schwab is waiting for before jumping headfirst into crypto could take shape soon

article-image

The FCA’s director of payments and digital assets shared some takeaways from chats with crypto companies and law firms

article-image

Let’s take a look at how US equities typically perform this time of year and what we might see in the coming days

article-image

Lumina introduces transparency and permissionless integration via an OP stack-based optimium, challenging traditional oracle designs