Arthur Hayes: Why Bitcoin Ordinals Project Airhead Isn't Another ‘Boring’ NFT Drop

BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes is launching a Bitcoin Ordinals collection dubbed Airhead, entering the market for Bitcoin-based collectibles by releasing a clutch of ballooned characters.

Comprising 10,000 NFT-like assets, the batch of inflated profile pictures (PFP) stem from a collaboration with Oyl Wallet. The digital wallet for Bitcoin launched earlier this month, and on Thursday began allowlisting would-be buyers for the Airhead drop. The startup counts Hayes’ family office Maelstrom as an investor.

“It's not like you're just offering them an NFT but on Bitcoin,” Hayes said in an interview with Decrypt. “It's a completely different thing that speaks to things that Bitcoiners care about.”

Developer Casey Rodarmor launched Bitcoin Ordinals early last year, and the protocol quickly gave rise to a buzzy market for Bitcoin-based collectibles. With the rollout of Rodarmor’s Runes protocol in April alongside Bitcoin’s halving, however, momentum has somewhat shifted toward fungible tokens, mirroring the meme coin meta present in the larger crypto space.

Using so-called recursive inscriptions, Airheads feature functionality that’s currently lacking for collectibles on other networks, Hayes said.

Based on the value of the Bitcoin wallet minting an Airhead, the character’s body will inflate. It was essential, from Hayes’ perspective, that Airheads bring something new to the digital art space while leveraging Ordinals-specific tech.

“I don't want to get through another 10,000-character, AI-generated PFP drop,” Hayes said of releasing digital art. “We've done that so many fucking times. It's boring.”

The same technology underpinning how Airheads blow up visually is the same functionality that a project called Pizza Ninjas used to create a game emulator on Bitcoin. Last year, recursive inscriptions were tapped as a way to create a music engine on Bitcoin too. In essence, recursive inscriptions enable more complex Bitcoin apps by tapping data from multiple Ordinals.

Airhead social media messaging lands somewhere between sarcasm and shitposting, and while project creative director and Oly’s Head of Product Cole Jorissen told Decrypt that the collection riffs on the body positivity movement, the project appears to be poking fun in any and all directions.

“We’re celebrating wealth as a character feature—fatness as a metaphor for wealth," he said.

Hayes said that Ordinals appeal to a different audience than NFTs on Ethereum and Solana because Bitcoin has the largest market cap and mindshare of any digital asset. And with Bitcoin closer to an all-time high price than other coins, he said, more people might buy digital art too.

“When you’re down money, you’re not going to invest in digital art,” Hayes said. “I think Ordinals are special and will be collected as Bitcoin breaks out of this range that we're in.”

Around $128 million worth of NFTs have traded hands on Ethereum over the past month, according to data from CryptoSlam. Compared to the $89 million in sales on Solana and $70 million sales on Bitcoin during that span, it means the network that popularized NFTs is still the industry’s leader.

At the same time, Hayes is taking a long-term view toward Ordinals. When the last Bitcoin is mined sometime around the year 2140, fees from people transacting Ordinals could help bolster rewards for miners while incentivizing them to keep the network secure, Hayes said.

“At the end of the day, we need to generate transaction fees for miners,” he said. “The most important thing to bring to Bitcoin is a digital cultural experience, because that gets new people to use it.”

Edited by Andrew Hayward