Taproot Wizards Delays 'Quantum Cats' for 3rd Time as Mint Site Gets Fixed, Tested

Bitcoin Ordinals project Taproot Wizards delayed the mint of its "Quantum Cats" collection for a third time, in a further embarrassment for the high-profile effort.

After the scheduled sale of the NFT-like digital art series was marred by technical issues on Monday, Taproot paused proceedings with a promise to resume 24 hours later. However, the plan was quickly abandoned in favor of delaying the sale until Thursday. But late Wednesday, on the eve of the resumption, another postponement was announced, until Feb. 5.

Some 3,000 of the cats are up for sale, for a fixed price of 0.1 BTC each, so the offering theoretically could raise about $12 million – enough to easily exceed the $7.5 million of investor money that the company raised last year.

Taproot Wizards says it underestimated demand from the community to purchase the Quantum Cats. In a post on X, the Quantum Cats handle wrote that the "issues" with the minting site had been fixed, but more time is needed for additional testing "to make sure we don’t discover any other unknown bugs on mint day."

"The mint website simply didn’t perform as well as it should have," according to the post. "Ultimately that’s our responsibility and we should’ve done a better job getting this right the first time."

The Bitcoin Ordinals protocol created quite the stir after its introduction a year, both good and bad. Effectively allowing NFTs to be minted and stored on Bitcoin's blockchain in a similar way to other chains like Ethereum introduced a utility that had previously been lacking.

However, for some Bitcoin purists, Ordinals simply created unnecessary congestion on the network – and served to distract from the original blockchain's original stated mission to be a peer-to-peer payments network.

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