Taproot Wizards raises $30 million to expand OP_CAT functionality on Bitcoin

Bitcoin Ordinals project Taproot Wizards is raising $30 million in its first post-seed round, according to an announcement on Tuesday. The funds, like its previous $7.5 million round , were raised to further the project’s effort at “making Bitcoin magical again,” co-founder Udi Wertheimer told The Block.

Taproot Wizards gets its name from the “Bitcoin Wizard” meme created in MS Paint as an early independent advertisement for “magic internet money” as well as the Taproot upgrade that expanded Bitcoin’s functionality. 

The round was led by early Taproot Wizards supporter Standard Crypto, with participation from Cyberfund, Collider Ventures, among others.

Wertheimer, who co-founded Taproot Wizards in 2023 with a compatriot from Crypto Twitter, Eric Wall, noted the project will use the fresh capital to advance the OP_CAT ecosystem that is advancing smart contract functionality on Bitcoin. 

“We're really focused on OP_CAT as the future of Bitcoin,” Wertheimer said. “So this will be both for development in-house and talent that will build this stuff in-house at our company and to help build the ecosystem outside of our company too.”

OP_CAT, short for OPcode Concatenate or OP_CONCAT, is a relatively simple scripting capability for Bitcoin to enable automated, customizable transactions. Wertheimer noted that the function is just 10 lines of code.

OP_CAT was enabled when Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto was still an active participant in the ecosystem but was disabled due to a lack of use cases. It was revisited in recent years to enable the types of applications being built on Ethereum and Solana directly on Bitcoin. 

“The cool thing about OPCAT, because it's so flexible,” Wertheimer said. “What I expect is that people are going to create tons of new protocols. Instead of having Ordinels and BRC20s, once per quarter, a new protocol like that shows up like the heydays of Ethereum or Solana, where people create new protocols on a daily basis.”

The Ordinals protocol, created by Casey Rodarmor, kicked off a revolution of activity on Bitcoin and fomented the mentality that bitcoin could be used as an onchain currency rather than just held as a form of “digital gold.” So-called Bitcoin Maximalists have advanced the idea that launching native tokens and NFTs on Bitcoin is cluttering the chain and, at the worst of times, raising fees for others who would use the Bitcoin network for payments. 

Taproot Wizards is among the most popular Bitcoin-based projects, as seen by its launch. In February 2023, the minting of Taproot Wizard #0001 resulted in a 4MB block, which was the largest Bitcoin block and transaction at the time. The team also launched the most popular Ordinals collection, Quantum Cats, which currently has the largest market cap of any Bitcoin NFT project.

The team has gone on to host a number of events across the world as part of its “Wizard School.”