- Taproot Wizards, an Ordinals project, secured $30M to scale the Bitcoin network
- However, a potential hike in Bitcoin block size through inscriptions has faced criticism from some core developers
Taproot Wizards, a Bitcoin Ordinals project, has secured a $30M capital raise to drive Bitcoin functionality and smart contract capabilities. In a recent announcement, Taproot Wizards’ founders noted that the fund will help “make Bitcoin magical again” through OP_CAT.
Part of the statement read,
“We will also use it to gear up development efforts and make bitcoin magical again with new and exciting protocols based on OP_CAT.”
Bitcoin Taproot – From NFT to scaling?
For the unfamiliar, OP_CAT stands for OPcode Concatenate, a Bitcoin proposal to enhance the base layer’s smart contract functionality. This is part of potential scalability options for Bitcoin that were made possible by the Taproot upgrade in 2021.
Additionally, Ordinals protocol and other inscriptions exploded afterwards, paving the way for Bitcoin-based NFT collections like Quantum Cat by Taproot Wizards, and Runes, amongst others.
After the recent raise, Taproot Wizards seems ready to drive further Bitcoin scalability for NFT and other use cases through OP_CAT.
The move will likely extend Bitcoin’s block size and increase block space utilization. In fact, according to a recent report, higher no. of inscriptions (adding arbitrary data like images, text, or even smart contracts) on the BTC network could increase block size to 4MB by 2026.
However, a section of Bitcoin core developers, led by Luke Davis Jr, believe that inscriptions and Ordinals are ‘spam’ and an ‘attack’ on the network. According to them, the block size should be capped below 1MB to limit the ‘spam.’
It remains to be seen whether the OP_CAT proposal and inscription craze on Bitcoin will continue amid divergent views from core developers.
