Bitcoin Ordinals startup OrdinalsBot — which helped mine the largest Bitcoin block ever and collaborates with Wu-Tang rapper Ghostface Killah on Ordinals — announced Tuesday that it has surpassed its funding goal with a $3 million seed round led by DACM . The round brings OrdinalsBot’s total funding to more than $4.5 million.
OrdinalsBot was launched in February last year after Casey Rodarmor released the Ordinals protocol on Bitcoin for on-chaining NFT-like media assets.
Initially, signing up an Ordinal required several complex steps, including downloading the entire history of the Bitcoin blockchain (also called a full node). OrdinalsBot aims to streamline the process of creating inscriptions for collectors and artists.
“The lap was hot from day one, which was great. We have had a very strong traction as one of the major Ordinals building groups,” said Toby Lewis, co-founder of OrdinalsBot. Declutter in an exclusive interview. “It took us a few weeks to get to oversubscribed status, which is pretty good for fundraising, but I think Ordinals is the topic of the moment.”
The money, OrdinalsBot said, will be used to expand infrastructure, including hiring and launching an Ordinals inscription marketplace.
Joining DACM in the seed funding round are Eden Block, Nural Capital, WWVentures, Lightning Ventures, Oak Grove Ventures, UTXO Management, Kenetic Capital, CMS Holdings, Kestrel0x1, Sora Ventures, London Real Ventures, Crypto Zombie and MDX Crypto.
In addition to digital art, OrdinalsBot enables on-chain blogging and text uploads to the Bitcoin network via Scribe. It supports BRC-20 tokens (also called fungible tokens on Bitcoin), inscription hierarchies between parents and children, and analytics and management via the API. For co-founder Brian Laughlin, the need for a seamless way to create ordinal inscriptions was apparent from the start.
“Basically people were doing Discord [over-the-counter trades]” said Laughlin. “Then we launched this product where it was just really easy, and then the product was immediately market-ready – and it was right at the time when the Bitcoin Punks were hitting it too.”
Traffic for OrdinalsBot increased, Laughlin said, after it accidentally became known to the public on Discord.
“I think in the end, like 80% of all those Punks, they actually came through our platform – the server completely melted down that weekend because there were just too many people,” he said, adding that it took six hours to get back online come.
“Business just went well, and so we were able to get our hands on almost everything that happened with Ordinals; we’ve had our hands in the pot somehow behind the scenes,” Laughlin said. “For example, last year we registered 90% of Magic Eden drops for them.”
In February, ahead of the expected Runestone airdrop, OrdinalsBot partnered with Marathon Digital to mint the largest inscription mined on the Bitcoin blockchain, parent company Runestone.
The OrdinalsBot interface. Image: OrdinalsBot
The Runestone took up a whopping 3.97 MB on the Bitcoin network and was part of the lead-up to a massive airdrop that sent runestone inscriptions to 112,383 eligible wallets, and it’s free for anyone to customize under a Creative Commons license.
The 3.97 MB project for inscription 63,140,674 used two blocks on the Bitcoin network to create the parent and child ordinal numbers. A parent/child inscription refers to how the history of the Ordinal is established and traced, making a third generation inscription the ‘grandchild’ of the original Ordinal.
Last week, the Runestone’s parent inscription, estimated to be worth 8 BTC or $525,000 at the time, was sent by project collaborator and pseudonymous NFT historian Leonidas to a wallet reportedly belonging to Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto. It was a symbolic move, but also one that prevented the creators from further tampering with the collection even if they wanted to.
“It is the mother inscription of the Runestone collection, so by burning it we have sealed the collection to the chain,” Leonidas said. “There can only be 112,384 Runestones now.”
Although the blocks mined for the Runestone totaled almost 4 MB, Laughlin says that data size is not necessary to send the inscription to Nakamoto.
“It’s just the way the Ordinals protocol works,” McLaughlin said. “These things are inscribed at the time of the transaction, with the Ordinals index parsing these transactions as they go through. The thing I sent is actually just the satoshi,” he said, referring to the smallest dominance of a Bitcoin (1 /100,000,000 BTC).
Lewis said OrdinalsBot is looking to roll out its marketplace around May or June, ideally to capitalize on the expected buzz around Runes. The upcoming Runes Protocol is a different take on minting fungible tokens on Bitcoin, similar to BRC-20 tokens, but with a seemingly more efficient design. It comes from Casey Rodarmor, the creator of Ordinals.
“It’s always difficult to predict with crypto markets,” Lewis says of the post-Runes window, “but we’re already seeing huge demand for BRC-20 fungible tokens.”
Thanks to Ordinals, inscriptions of digital art, music, text, and even video games have taken up a large portion of the Bitcoin blockchain over the past year.
Last week, Wu-Tang Clan founder Ghostface Killah announced a collection of music-themed Ordinals inscriptions in collaboration with Nakamotos on BTC – makers of the NakaPepes Collection – Rare Scrilla, and OrdinalsBot to add the songs to the Bitcoin network add.
When asked what he would say to critics and Bitcoin purists who claim Ordinals are an abuse of the network, Laughlin said that it comes with the territory.
“It is a permissionless network, Ordinals does not do anything that is not standard or within the boundaries of the protocol,” he said. “If you take a step back and look at what [Ordinals] that has been brought to market over the last twelve months, especially in terms of excitement, of people being creative with Bitcoin and building on Bitcoin, that alone has reinvigorated Bitcoin endlessly.”
Edited by Andrew Hayward