Announcing Our Investment in OrdinalsBot

We are thrilled to announce Deep Ventures’ investment into OrdinalsBot, who just raised their $1M seed round!

Our investment was co-syndicated with Lightning Ventures, a prominent Bitcoin-focused venture fund and syndicate. We joined Bitcoin Frontier Fund, Howard Morgan (B Capital and formerly of First Round Capital), Sebastian Borget (COO of Sandbox), and many other highly-respected investors in this round.

Here’s why we are so excited about what the OrdinalsBot team is building.

What is OrdinalsBot?

OrdinalsBot was first to market with an online tool that allows anyone to easily inscribe Ordinals on the Bitcoin blockchain. 

Before OrdinalsBot existed, users would require the technical knowledge to set up a full Bitcoin node and access the entire Ordinals index if they wanted to inscribe an Ordinal. 

OrdinalsBot allows inscriptions in just a few clicks. The product has expanded and can now inscribe BRC20s, .sats names, bitmaps, and much more.

The team recently launched its API and SDK to provide powerful tools for developers to seamlessly integrate Ordinals functionality into their projects. These tools are being used by some of the largest projects in the Ordinals space, such as Magic Eden, Xverse Wallet, EmblemVault, and many others.

And they have many new features around recursive inscriptions, rare sats, and more in development.

OrdinalsBot has achieved an amazing amount of traction (100K+ users!), revenue (in the millions!), and profit (yes, they make money!) in just a few months.

We are excited about their ability to be a fundamental building block in the expanding Ordinals ecosystem. 

Wait - What’s an Ordinal?

Ordinal theory is a numbering system that assigns values to each individual satoshi (or sat, for short) - the smallest unit of Bitcoin, where 100M sats equals 1 Bitcoin. These specific sats can be inscribed with text, images, or other arbitrary data and metadata that forever live on the Bitcoin blockchain - and there you have an Ordinal.

These Ordinal inscriptions are similar to NFTs in that they are unique with inscribed data. But Ordinals are considered more like digital artifacts because the data is stored directly on the Bitcoin blockchain instead of residing on another chain or file storage network.

Ordinals was created by Casey Rodarmor in November 2022 but widely launched in February 2023. Ordinals are less than one year old but has had a massive impact in a short timeframe.

You can read more about Ordinals on the CoinMarketCap blog.

Ordinals Market Overview

While the hype has died down a bit since the peak in May 2023, Ordinals has achieved impressive traction in a short amount of time.

As of today, over 35M Ordinals have been inscribed, leading to over $58M of network fees paid. Please see this Dune Analytics dashboard for market metrics. 

Major NFT collections such as TwelveFold (launched by Yuga Labs, makers of Bored Ape Yacht Club), Taproot Wizards (by Udi Wertheimer and Eric Wall), Bitcoin Punks, and many more have been launched.

With the development of the Ordinals and BRC20 standards, many developers are now building on Bitcoin. The excitement, experimentation, and innovation around Bitcoin feels very much like Ethereum in 2017. 

OrdinalsBot has already played a huge role in this progress and we believe they will continue to do so in the future.

The Team

The OrdinalsBot team has extensive experience in the intersection of Bitcoin, NFTs, and financial technologies like Lightning and DeFi.

Co-founder and CEO Brian Laughlan is a designer and front-end developer with a keen eye for great UI and UX. He also founded the NFT collection Satoshibles and thus has a deep understanding of the importance of community in crypto.

Tech Lead Zach has years of experience developing on Bitcoin and Lightning. You can see his Github and portfolio.

Toby Lewis is a Co-founder and Head of Strategy. Toby has broad experience in blockchain as co-founder of MetaLink Capital and Novum Insights, and advises many blockchain projects such as ESG DAO, DLT, Plutus DeFi, and others.

Co-founder and CFO David Henderson worked with Toby at MetaLink and Novum and has decades of experience in finance, operations, and general management in the technology industry.  

We believe this unique combination of software development, design, community, and business skills will allow the OrdinalsBot team to continue to make a huge dent in the Ordinals space.

Conclusion

OrdinalsBot’s first-mover advantage, core focus on inscription infrastructure, great UI/UX, and extremely strong team give it a competitive edge over other inscription tools. They’ve built great products and achieved an amazing level of traction in a short amount of time.

Congrats to Brian, Zach, Toby, David and the entire OrdinalsBot team on the fundraise! We are excited to be a part of OrdinalsBot’s journey and look forward to helping them continue to be a major player in the Ordinals space.