Taproot Wizards Crash 50% Below Dutch Auction Price

The highly anticipated Bitcoin Ordinals collection, Taproot Wizards, has failed to revive the Ordinals market and is trading 50% below its Dutch auction price, and 20% below its whitelisted mint price.

The collection minted out on March 27 after its Dutch auction phase concluded, with the remaining wizards going for 0.31 BTC ($26,000).

Whitelisted minters paid varying prices depending on factors such as community participation or holding the Taproot Wizards’ “Entangled Cat” ordinals, which are equivalent to two of their Quantum Cats ordinals. Entangled Cat holders paid 0.1 BTC ($8300) to mint, while most minters paid 0.2 BTC ($16,500).

The collection now trades at just 0.16 BTC, or $13,000, marking a 50% loss for Dutch auction participants and a 20% loss for a majority of minters.

Entangled Cat holders are technically up on their mints. However, the Quantum Cats collection has plummeted in value to a 0.05 BTC floor price, a 75% decrease from the 0.2 BTC that the Quantum Cats were trading at prior to the announcement of the Taproot Wizards mint.

Taproot Wizards carry both the provenance of a historic collection on the Bitcoin blockchain and potentially a more traditional project building out products and services on Bitcoin.

The flagship wizard, #0001, was amongst the first 1000 inscriptions on the network, and a majority of the collection is inscribed around the 150,000 mark, while there are over 90 million total inscriptions on the chain today.

The Taproot Wizards team plans on using the mint funds, as well as the $30 million they raised in February, to build on Bitcoin, particularly focusing on revitalizing Satoshi Nakamoto’s original adaptation of Bitcoin smart contracts, known as OP_CAT.

Prior to the mint, founder Udi Wertheimer told The Defiant, “On February 4, Taproot Wizards announced they raised an additional $30M, led by Standard Crypto, indicating institutional support for building on Bitcoin and to help move the needle forward on OP_CAT.”

Needless to say, most minters are not happy with the price action. An NFT analyst known as Wale took to X today to speak on the situation and said, “I’m down $8k USD on a mint (A MINT!!) in less than four days. How is that even possible?”

Another investor, Mondogg, responded, “It's an interesting problem. Most hyped mints pass on the delta between the demand price and mint price to the minter, making the minter the initial money if they flip. Wizards kept that profit for themselves…”