Bitcoin · Ordinals + Runes · on-chain game · 2024
Pizza Pets — the first on-chain pets on Bitcoin.
A Bitcoin-native Tamagotchi built on Ordinals and Runes — feed your pet to keep it alive, or it dies on-chain and exits the supply forever. Deflationary by design. 733k+ on-chain feedings, 46k+ pets permanently burned, 40 BTC traded in secondary. Core developer on the inscription stack, game-state engine, and multi-chain airdrop mechanics.
By the numbers
733k
On-chain feedings · each a Bitcoin transaction
46,464
Pets permanently burned · ~80% of supply
40 BTC
All-time secondary volume
2024
Shipped · still live
On-chain dashboard · Bitcoin mainnet
The numbers no off-chain game can fake.
Every feeding, every death, every trade settles on Bitcoin. These are the exact on-chain counts from the Lambda dashboard export — not a CMS, not a mocked snapshot.
On-chain feedings
733,752
each a Bitcoin transaction
Pets burned forever
46,464
~80% of original supply
Pets still alive
11,801
of 58,265 ever minted
Secondary volume
40.3 BTC
1,321 unique owners
Deflationary mechanic
Four out of every five pets ever minted have died on-chain.
80%
Burned forever
46,464 pets
20%
Still alive
11,801 pets
Every pet that dies exits the supply permanently. The collection can only shrink — and it has, by 46,464 pets and counting.
Species survival · immortal stage
Eleven species. 195 difference between first and last.
01
Sunbloom
1,207
02
Electroid
1,127
03
Flamora
1,076
04
Mythtail
1,071
05
Aquafin
1,066
06
Petroil
1,055
07
Coalvim
1,054
08
Terrapod
1,045
09
Galewing
1,044
10
Fluffypuff
1,031
11
Frostfang
1,012
Bitcoin Ordinals · secondary market
40.3 BTC through secondary.
- All-time volume
- 40.33 BTC
- Unique owners
- 1,321
- Floor
- 0.000358 BTC
- Listed
- 441
Snapshot · Bitcoin block 917,442 · 2025-10-03
The problem
Ordinals are great for static art. Games are not static. Pizza Pets needed a living game loop — pet state that changes with player behaviour, feedings that actually matter, death that actually removes supply — all settling on Bitcoin, the chain least friendly to state.
Doing this as off-chain state with a database on top would have defeated the point. The whole reason to build a pets game on Bitcoin in 2024 was to prove that real-time game logic could live on the chain itself, through recursive inscriptions and the emerging Runes protocol.
The brief was dense: deflationary tokenomics, daily feeding rituals, multi-chain airdrop coordination to reach the existing NFT audience, and a dashboard experience that made the on-chain mechanics feel like a game, not a wallet transaction list.
What I did
Five moves that made the game loop work.
On-chain pet state via recursive inscriptions
Each pet carries state — hunger, age, status — referenced through recursive inscription endpoints. Feeding is an on-chain action; starvation is an on-chain consequence. No off-chain database pretending to be the source of truth. The same recursive pattern we built for Pizza Ninjas carries the heavier game state here.
Deflationary death mechanic
Pets that go unfed die on-chain and permanently exit the supply — the mechanic that makes the collection actually deflationary rather than "deflationary in theory." One of the first NFT projects where the economic pressure is the gameplay, not a separate marketing layer.
Runes integration at the tokenomics layer
Season 1 launched alongside Bitcoin's Runes protocol, with feeding and reward loops denominated in Runes tokens. The project was early enough that the dev team helped define what "Runes in a game" could even look like — patterns that later drops borrowed.
Multi-chain airdrop coordination
To reach the pre-Ordinals NFT audience, the drop coordinated claim mechanics across chains. Careful allowlist snapshots, gas-aware claim windows, and cross-chain UX without forcing users to hand-bridge for an NFT.
Ship cadence — season-based content, not hype-based
Season 1 ran for months with real feeding data tracked in operator dashboards. No pivot to chase attention. The content calendar was driven by gameplay milestones, not Twitter sentiment — which is why a million interactions compounded instead of one launch-week peak.
What transferred
Patterns I now reach for on every on-chain game.
- Games on Bitcoin are possible today if you accept that latency is a design constraint, not a bug — the pet feeding loop leans *into* block cadence instead of fighting it.
- Deflationary mechanics work when death is on-chain. Everything else is marketing. The supply curve of a game where pets die is the gameplay.
- Recursive inscriptions + Runes is the working primitive stack for on-chain games on Bitcoin. The pattern now transfers to any project that needs evolving state without leaving the chain.
- Multi-chain airdrop coordination is its own engineering discipline. Snapshot freshness, gas windows, and claim UX beat any amount of marketing budget for reach.
Stack
- Bitcoin Core + ord protocol
- Recursive inscription endpoints — pet state
- Runes — season tokenomics
- Multi-chain airdrop mechanics
- Operator dashboards + feeding analytics
- Node infra + monitoring
Free download · 6 pages · PDF
What I learned shipping 1,500 Ordinals on Bitcoin.
Pre-launch, launch-day, and the 90 days after — with the mistakes that cost real BTC. Ordinals, Runes, and beyond.
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