Co-founder of BitMEX Arthur Hayes launches one Bitcoin ordinal numbers collection called Airhead, which is entering the market for Bitcoin-based collectibles by releasing a line of inflated characters.
Consisting of 10,000 NFT-like assets, the series of inflated profile photos (PFP) comes from a partnership with Oyl Wallet. The digital wallet for Bitcoin launched earlier this month and began allowing potential buyers for the Airhead drop on Thursday. The startup counts Hayes’ family office Maelstrom as an investor.
“It’s not like you’re just offering them an NFT, but on Bitcoin,” Hayes said in an interview with Declutter. “It’s something completely different that speaks to things Bitcoiners care about.”
Developer Casey Rodarmor launched Bitcoin Ordinals early last year, and the protocol quickly spawned a bustling market for Bitcoin-based collectibles. With the rollout of Rodarmor’s Runes protocol However, in April, alongside Bitcoin’s halving, momentum has shifted somewhat towards fungible tokens, reflecting the meme coin meta present in the larger crypto space.
Here’s my curatorial essay on why Airheads are so stupid. https://t.co/8xkNOFBI5F pic.twitter.com/5Yt7aP6gDh
— Arthur Hayes (@CryptoHayes) July 31, 2024
Using so-called recursive inscriptions, Airheads provides functionality currently lacking for collectibles on other networks, Hayes said.
Based on the value of the Bitcoin wallet an Airhead hits will inflate the character’s body. From Hayes’ perspective, it was essential that Airheads bring something new to the digital art world using Ordinals-specific technology.
“I don’t want to see another AI-generated PFP drop of 10,000 characters,” Hayes said of releasing digital art. ‘We’ve done that so many times. It’s boring.”
The same technology that underpins how Airheads visually inflate is the same functionality that a project called Pizza Ninjas used to create a game emulator on Bitcoin. Last year, recursive inscriptions were used as a way to create a music engine also on Bitcoin. Essentially, recursive inscriptions enable more complex Bitcoin apps by using data from multiple ordinal numbers.
Airhead social media posts land somewhere between sarcasm and nonsense, while also being creative director of the project and Oly’s head of product Cole Jorissen told it Declutter Because the collection taps into the body positivity movement, the project seems to poke fun in all directions.
sneak peak of the fat-o-meter. Maybe mess around and open the whitelist later this week. pic.twitter.com/CwOHfV0GMR
— Airhead (@AirheadFun) August 12, 2024
“We celebrate wealth as a character trait – fatness as a metaphor for wealth,” he said.
Hayes said Ordinals appeal to a different audience than NFTs on Ethereum and Solana because Bitcoin has the largest market cap and mindshare of any digital asset. And with Bitcoin closer to an all-time high price than other currencies, he says, more people could also buy digital art.
“If you’re short on money, you’re not going to invest in digital art,” Hayes said. “I think Ordinals are special and will be collected once Bitcoin moves out of this range that we are in.”
According to data from CryptoSlam. Compared to sales of $89 million on Solana and $70 million on Bitcoin during that period, this means the network that popularized NFTs is still the industry leader.
At the same time, Hayes has a long-term vision for Ordinals. When the last Bitcoin is mined sometime around the year 2140, the fees from people transacting with Ordinals could help increase rewards for miners while incentivizing them to keep the network secure, Hayes said.
“Ultimately we need to generate transaction fees for miners,” he said. “The most important thing we need to bring to Bitcoin is a digital cultural experience, because that will get new people using it.”
Edited by Andrew Hayward