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

by Jack Kubinec /

November 22, 2023 01:08 pm

Source: Taproot Wizards

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.

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.

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.

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