🧙‍♂️ Wizards for sale

It’s Tuesday, and we’ve got art on Bitcoin, Grok, and more on deck today.

Markets may still be dragging their feet, but we have no shortage of action on the social and development side.

Speaking of which, who else is heading to San Francisco for the Game Developers Conference next week? I’ll be there on the ground, interviewing crypto execs and leaders in the crypto gaming space. Looks like there will be a bigger presence than I was expecting this year!

— Kate Irwin

P.S. Let me know how you’re liking The Drop! Send me an email at [email protected].

Taproot Wizards finally for sale

Wanna be a wizard? 

Taproot Wizards, a collection of “magic internet jpegs” inspired by the 2013 r/Bitcoin wizard, are holding their first-ever public sale. This sale is happening two years after the Wizards were inscribed onto Bitcoin as Ordinals. Unlike traditional NFTs, Ordinals are pieces of data or art attached directly to satoshis (sats), which are 1/100,000,000th of a bitcoin.

2,085 Wizards will be up for sale through the project’s website starting March 25, with additional honorary Wizards to be inscribed soon and not included in the sale. The honorary Wizards will be given away. 

Minting a Taproot Wizard will cost hopeful collectors 0.2 BTC (roughly $16,000 at time of writing), though it's worth noting that there will be discounts for holders of Quantum Cats — another Bitcoin Ordinals collection from the same team.

If you own two "entangled" Quantum Cats — one with the "alive" trait and one with the "dead" trait — you can mint a Wizard for 0.1 BTC (about $7,900). The "entangled" mechanic plays off Schrödinger’s Cat, the famous quantum physics thought experiment where a cat inside a box exists within both a living and dead state until observed.

The Taproot Wizards price reflects their scarcity — only 2,121 exist, unlike more typical 10,000-piece collections. And yes, the price is steep, especially in this market. But with their cult-like following, I wouldn’t be surprised if they still sell out.

“It’s been quite the journey,” Wizards founder Udi Wertheimer said of the past two years since launching the project. 

The mere existence of Ordinals art on Bitcoin has disgruntled some Bitcoin maximalists, with some calling it blockchain “vandalism.”

Instead, fans had to prove their worth through various bizarre-yet-hilarious displays of commitment. According to Wertheimer, some took it to extremes — showering in full wizard attire, leaping out of helicopters into swimming pools wearing robes and pointy hats, or even braving a car wash with the windows down, robe and all — just to get the team’s attention.

Unorthodox? Perhaps. But plenty were willing to embrace the absurdity for a shot at owning a piece of Bitcoin history.

“If someone wants a Taproot Wizard bad enough, they’ll find a way,” he said.

The Taproot Wizards team, which currently operates with 10 people, is actively hiring. Last month, they raised $30 million in a funding round led by Standard Crypto. They’re advocating for OP_CAT, a proposal that could add more functionality to Bitcoin and would be similar to what Ethereum’s smart contracts offer if passed. Originally created by Satoshi Nakamoto, OP_CAT was disabled in 2010 due to concerns over potential security risks and limited immediate use cases at the time. If reintroduced, it would allow Bitcoin scripts to manipulate and combine pieces of data dynamically, opening the door for more advanced transaction types.

Among other possibilities, it could enable covenants (rules restricting how BTC can be spent), improved smart contracts, and more flexible transaction logic. While not as complex as Ethereum’s smart contracts, OP_CAT could expand Bitcoin’s capabilities without compromising its security and decentralization-first ethos.

Most Wizards will be sold via the whitelist, and a few will be offered on Dutch auction. Another few are being set aside to be given to users for free, who have proved their interest in and loyalty to the Wizards, like one guy who replied on Twitter asking for a Wizard for 365 days in a row.

Why did they wait two years before offering the Wizards for sale? 

“It proves to everyone that this is a long-lasting thing, it’s not just a bunch of jpegs we’re trying to sell and move on,” Wertheimer said. 

I do agree with Udi that Bitcoin (and its layer-2s like Stacks and Lightning) have so much potential to become a real hub for art, apps, and other neat crypto use cases besides for payments alone.

In my opinion, people won’t likely be buying Taproot Wizards for the Microsoft Paint-esque art. They’ll be buying it for clout, for the community, and to be a part of one of the more famous Ordinals collections.

Coinbase claims Grok ‘launched’ a token

The Base X account is claiming that Grok, X’s AI model, has created a token on Base with the help of crypto automation tools Clanker and Bankrbot. The AI-controlled wallet has already gained over $200,000 in fees, according to the post. 

“AI is owning wallets, making markets, and generating revenue. Welcome to the future,” the Base account wrote.

While it’s interesting that an AI can manage its own crypto wallets, posting something like that in a time where markets are down bad is a bit cringe, if you ask me.

The responses on Twitter suggest I’m not alone in that thought, and indicate that Coinbase is not, in fact, reading the room with its post. Some accused them of allegedly creating the token, calling the move a “grift,” “embarrassing,” and even dubbed Base “a joke,” while others accused Coinbase of trying to farm fees. 

But it’s unlikely Coinbase created it. We don’t know yet who actually set all of this up, and the Base team is likely just drawing attention to something they noticed on the chain. 

While AI could be used to automate trading for people or manage projects for them, the idea that AI models running their own wallets will be “the future” of crypto is a bit sad.

And things have been less chaotic lately. Solana memecoin platform pump.fun has seen its fees plummet recently as fewer coins are being launched on a daily basis. Over half of the top 15 memecoins on Base are seeing less than $200K in weekly volume, though BRETT, TOSHI, and DEGEN are outliers, with over $10 million in weekly volume at time of writing.

The number of daily transactions on Base has declined since January, and the number of new users has more or less stagnated. Daily active user counts have fallen to about 350,000, and daily ETH volume has dropped since its January peak, as well. Base fees and revenue are also down. 

Let’s get the truth from Grok itself on supposedly “creating” a token:

Mostly, I think Crypto Twitter is tired of smoke and mirrors — including AI gimmicks.

• Blockchain gaming platform Abstract is cracking down on inactive and low-quality token-farming streamers, removing 50 to 100 per week while still approving new ones, according to the company’s marketing lead.

• Human Wallet, a crypto wallet trying to do away with “blind signing,” is opening up its alpha version to the public for anyone to test out. Blind signing refers to approving a transaction without fully understanding its details, often due to unreadable data. This can lead to phishing attacks, which Human Wallet aims to prevent through clearer transaction transparency.

• Social video app JellyJelly, created by Venmo co-founder Iquram Magdon Ismail, will soon let users send crypto without having to exit the app, the company tells me. The JellyJelly token is down 65% in the past month.

It’s not just crypto that’s been crashing lately. But hey, at least we can make memes about it, right?