The highly expected sale of the “Quantum Cats” debut collection of Bitcoin inscriptions by Taproot Wizards, a project under the Ordinals protocol, encountered technical issues on Monday, causing frustration among users and resulting in an embarrassing delay.
The sale, which was set to offer approximately 3,000 digital cats in homage to the Bitcoin improvement proposal OP_CAT, was scheduled to begin with a two-hour “whitelist” window at 17:00 UTC (noon ET) on Monday but had to be postponed until Tuesday due to server overload.
“There’s been an incredible demand for the cats today, and our servers simply couldn’t handle the amount of people who were trying to mint,” Taproot Wizards posted on X.
Priced at 0.1 BTC ($4,300) each, the potential fundraising from the sale could have amounted to as much as 300 BTC ($12.9 million) if all cats were sold. However, only around 30% of the cats were successfully minted on Monday, representing nearly 1,000 cats and approximately 100 BTC ($4.3 million) in sales.
This setback comes after Taproot Wizards secured $7.5 million in seed funding in November, underscoring the significant interest in projects focused on NFTs within the Ordinals protocol, colloquially known as “NFTs on Bitcoin.” The Genesis Cat, the first item in the Quantum Cats series, previously sold for an impressive $254,000 at auction house Sotheby’s earlier in the month.
Co-founder Udi Wertheimer issued an apology to disappointed buyers during a live session on the social media platform X, acknowledging the glitches and expressing regret over the unexpected user experience. Following the whitelist window, the plan was to pause minting for an hour before making the remaining cats available for general sale.
Complaints flooded the project’s Discord channel, with users expressing frustration over the minting process. The Ordinals protocol enables the inscription of data into satoshis, the smallest units of Bitcoin, effectively creating NFTs on the Bitcoin network. Although the protocol debuted in early 2023, it has sparked controversy within the Bitcoin community, with some users criticizing it for allegedly congesting the network unnecessarily.