Taproot Wizards, the bitcoin startup that last week announced a $7.5 million round led by Standard Crypto, appoints pseudonymous developer Rijndael as Chief Technology Officer.
Taproot Wizards, co-founded by Udi Wertheimer and Eric Wall, is a generative art collection featuring bitcoin ordinal numbers, a recent addition to the network that allows data to be inscribed as NFTs and other digital collectibles.
Bitcoin ordinals have seen a spike in popularity in November, racking up nearly $30 million in transaction fees since November 4, according to Blockworks Research. Largely due to the demand for blockspace created by ordinals, bitcoin transaction fees have become more expensive than Ethereum’s for the first time in three years.
Read more: Ethereum won’t reverse Bitcoin anytime soon, but Ordinals could change that
Before joining Taproot Wizards, Rijndael said he worked as a technical lead on Amazon’s NFT project and more recently on Bitkey’s self-custody wallet.
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“The Ordinals ecosystem has a real opportunity to expand what we consider Bitcoin culture, and give more types of people the opportunity to connect with a Bitcoin they can relate to,” Rijndael wrote.
Read more: Avalanche gets the ‘Ordinals’ bump and sets a new transaction record
The new CTO also said he is looking for a full-stack engineer.
Taproot Wizards plans to produce 2,121 of its NFTs, which are variations on a Microsoft Paint drawing of a wizard posted to Reddit a decade ago to promote bitcoin.
Generative NFT projects like Taproot Wizards are among the most successful crypto projects to date. Bored Apes and CryptoPunks are the second and third best-selling NFT collections ever, according to CryptoSlam, and both are stored on the Ethereum blockchain.