Taproot Wizards Delays 'Quantum Cats' Sale for 2nd Time, After Messy Bitcoin NFT Debut

Bitcoin Ordinals project Taproot Wizards delayed the mint of its 'Quantum Cats' collection for a second time, after halting the process mid-sale on Monday amidst persistent technical issues.

The sale is now set to resume Feb. 1. Initially the project had said it would resume the process on Tuesday.

The planned sale of around 3,000 digital cats, designed to honor a Bitcoin improvement proposal known as OP_CAT, kicked off with a two-hour window for "whitelist" buyers at 17:00 UTC Monday, but the project's Discord channel soon filled up with complaints and screen grabs from users who said they were getting stuck on the minting website.

"We disappointed you today," Taproot Wizards co-founder Udi Wertheimer posted on X. "We had big plans for mint day and we didn’t live up to your expectations of us and to our expectations of ourselves."

The whitelist mint will recommence at 17:00 UTC (2 pm ET) on Feb. 1 and last five hours instead of two. Following a one-hour break, the mint will then continue for general sale until the collection sells out.

"We tried to build a custom, unique minting experience that solves issues like fee/gas wars, mempool sniping, etc, and gives everyone an instant guaranteed mint," Wertheimer added. "It was new and innovative, but needless to say, it did not work out as well as we expected."

Taproot Wizards raised $7.5 million in a seed funding round in November for its projects focused on the fast-growing arena of inscriptions from the Ordinals protocol, colloquially referred to as "NFTs on Bitcoin."

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