The sale of a debut collection of “Quantum Cats” Bitcoin inscriptions by Ordinals project Taproot Wizards was marred by technical issues on Monday.
The planned sale of around 3,000 digital cats, designed to honor a Bitcoin improvement proposal known as OP_CAT, began Monday at 5:00 PM UTC with a two-hour “whitelist” period, but this had to be postponed until Tuesday because of the problems encountered. .
“The cats are in incredible demand these days, and our servers simply couldn’t handle the amount of people trying to mine,” Taproot Wizards posted on X, adding that 30% of the cats had been sold. This would amount to approximately 90 BTC ($3.9 million).
The collection retailed for 0.1 BTC ($4,300), meaning as much as 300 BTC ($12.9 million) could have been raised if each cat had been sold.
It was an inauspicious start for Taproot Wizards, which raised $7.5 million in a seed funding round in November to advance its Ordinals-focused projects.
Udi Wertheimer, one of the company’s co-founders, apologized to potential buyers during a live Spaces session on the social media platform X.
“There have been some issues,” Wertheimer said. “I know this is not the experience people expected.”
After the two-hour whitelist, the coining was scheduled to pause for an hour before the remaining cats became available for general sale.
On Monday, complaints filled the project’s Discord channel: “This has to be one of the worst coin experiences I’ve ever seen,” one user wrote.
The Ordinals protocol allows writing data into satoshis – the smallest units of bitcoin – effectively creating non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the Bitcoin network. The protocol debuted in early 2023 and became a controversial topic for the Bitcoin community, with some users saying it was senselessly overloading the network.
Read more: Bitcoin-Based Digital Art Sculpture ‘Genesis Cat’ Sold for $254,000 at Sotheby’s Auction
