According to CoinDesk, the sale of a debut collection of 'Quantum Cats' Bitcoin inscriptions by Ordinals project Taproot Wizards faced technical issues on Monday. The planned sale of around 3,000 digital cats, designed to honor a Bitcoin improvement proposal known as OP_CAT, began with a two-hour 'whitelist' window at 17:00 UTC Monday. However, due to the encountered issues, the sale had to be postponed until Tuesday. Taproot Wizards posted that their servers couldn't handle the number of people trying to mint, as 30% of the cats had been sold, equating to around 90 BTC ($3.9 million). The collection was on sale for 0.1 BTC ($4,300), meaning as much as 300 BTC ($12.9 million) could have been raised if every cat was sold.
Taproot Wizards, which raised $7.5 million in a seed funding round in November to advance its Ordinals-focused projects, experienced an inauspicious start. Udi Wertheimer, one of the company's co-founders, apologized to would-be buyers during a live Spaces session on a social-media platform. After the two-hour whitelist window, the plan was for minting to pause for an hour before the remaining cats became available for general sale. Complaints filled the project's Discord channel on Monday, with one user describing it as one of the worst mint experiences they had ever seen.
The Ordinals protocol allows the inscriptions of data into satoshis – the smallest units of bitcoin – effectively creating non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the Bitcoin network. The protocol debuted at the start of 2023, becoming a contentious issue for the Bitcoin community, with some users saying they are pointlessly congesting the network.
