Taproot Wizards' New Bitcoin NFTs Already Trading at Twice the Initial Sale Price

Investors who bought the freshly minted "Quantum Cats" $NFT-like images from the Bitcoin Ordinals project Taproot Wizards were already flipping them on Tuesday for more than twice the initial sales price – in a sign of enduring demand for digital art inscribed onto the original blockchain.

The lowest available price for the Quantum Cats listed on the $NFT marketplace Magic Eden was 0.243 $BTC ($10,481) on Tuesday, versus the fixed price of 0.1 $BTC each in the primary mint that concluded Monday.

According to Magic Eden, 115 $BTC worth of trading volume had transpired within hours after the Quantum Cats were delivered to their original owners. Some 507 of the images were still listed for sale.

The original minting of 3,000 Quantum Cats closed on Monday, with the series selling out – theoretically bringing in about $13 million of revenue for the Taproot Wizards project from its debut collection.

That was despite much angst over the past week as the Taproot Wizards minting website was plagued by technical issues, causing frustration and leading to widespread complaints on the project's Discord channel. A suspension of the process on the first day was followed by multiple postponements.

This week's results showed buyers undeterred, with the proceeds well exceeding the $7.5 million that the Taproot Wizards, led by co-founders Udi Wertheimer and Eric Wall, raised from investors last year.

The project has ridden a wave of enthusiasm for the Ordinals inscriptions, sometimes referred to as "NFTs on Bitcoin."

The Ordinals protocol and its "inscriptions" – launched in early 2023 by creator Casey Rodarmor – effectively allows NFTs to be minted and stored on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Previous waves of $NFT hype were focused on other blockchains, such as Ethereum, that have historically been seen as more programmable than Bitcoin, which is the oldest blockchain and still the largest by market capitalization.