Team behind Ordinals project Taproot Wizards leads 'strategic' raise for Bitcoin's version of Pump.fun

Ordinals project Taproot Wizards led a strategic funding round for Bitcoin’s version of memecoin launchpad Pump.fun, according to Udi Wertheimer. The protocol, ODIN•FUN, is the first platform to handle the full lifecycle management of Bitcoin memecoins, from creation to trading.

The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. Taproot Wizards, the group behind the largest Ordinals project, recently announced the public auction of its Wizards NFTs.

“This is the only investment we made in another startup and in general I wouldn’t expect more such announcements for us,” Taproot Wizards co-founder Wertheimer told The Block. “This is a special strategic case because we believe ODIN•FUN is one of the most promising apps in the Bitcoin ecosystem currently, and growing that ecosystem is an important goal for us.”

Mirrored off Solana’s Pump.fun, users can launch a token and trade it against BTC. It was designed by the founders of Bitcoin collectibles marketplace Bioniq to reinvigorate the diminishing Runes memecoin market. 

The protocol leverages both Dfinity's Internet Computer and the Bitcoin-based Runes protocol launched by Ordinals creator Casey Rodamor last year. It runs a dedicated appchain called Valhalla to route around some of the issues that come with Bitcoin’s lack of native smart contracts and slow finality speeds.

“One of the great things about the product is that the usage of ICP is completely transparent to the end user,” Wertheimer said. “Users just use their favorite Bitcoin wallet to connect and they wouldn’t even know that behind the scenes there’s an ICP system.”

Runes, launched on Bitcoin's 2024 halving block, are a relatively new type of Bitcoin-based token. Unlike “inscriptions,” which reinvigorated the case for using the Bitcoin blockchain for more than just storing wealth, Runes maintain their fungibility. 

Like Pump.fun, the Runes created on ODIN•FUN trade along a bonding curve, which increases their price along a predefined, exponential curve until the total market cap reaches the value of one BTC. At that point, the token is launched on a custom automated market maker for secondary market trading. 

ODIN•FUN was launched in private beta in January and opened to the public about a month later. By March, the platform saw $30 million in trading volumes and notched 20,000 users who created nearly 4,000 tokens.

Using a custom-built Bitcoin Layer 2 on ICP allows the protocol to have faster and smoother transaction processing than Bitcoin but still inherit Bitcoin’s security. ODIN•FUN boasts two-second transaction times and zero gas costs. The blockchain could also eventually become compatible with other chains, including Solana and Ethereum, and support other Bitcoin-based assets. 

“Internally at Taproot Wizards we’ve felt for a long time that the trading experience for bitcoin-based assets is not good enough,” Wertheimer said. “Users don’t care about ‘layers,’ they just want to trade easily. Bridging should be seamless and transparent, like it’s not even there.”