Bitcoin · Ordinals · 2024
Pizza Ninjas
Technical lead on the Bitcoin pipeline that inscribed the original 1,500-piece collection, then helped turn its recursive assets into a programmable system for traits, animation, customization, and games.
The challenge
Ship an ordered collection on Bitcoin while fees, mempool conditions, and immature Ordinals tooling could change underneath the run.
In early 2024 there was no comfortable batch-inscription path to lean on. Every item carried transaction cost, UTXO state, ordering, parent-child relationships, and permanent provenance. A bad retry could duplicate work; a bad fee decision could strand a batch; a sequencing error could damage the collection record. The pipeline had to expose those failure states before any irreversible broadcast.
Engineering depth
Manifest-driven ordering
Every asset, destination, dependency, and execution state was mapped before broadcast, giving the run one source of truth for what was prepared, sent, and confirmed.
Fee-aware batching
Work was grouped into controlled batches and evaluated against live fee conditions instead of assuming one static estimate would survive the full launch.
Recursive asset architecture
Shared SVG traits and code could be inscribed once and referenced by the collection, avoiding 1,500 full duplicate payloads and creating a base for block-height traits, animation, and later utilities.
Recoverable operations
Preparation, broadcast, and confirmation were treated as separate states so incomplete work could be reconciled and resumed without blindly replaying finished inscriptions.
My role
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01
Built the custom orchestration needed to prepare, batch, and track the 1,500-inscription launch when reliable batch tooling did not yet exist.
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02
Designed the run around UTXO control, live fee movement, ordering, retries, and confirmation visibility.
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03
Worked on the recursive reference model that turned the artwork into reusable on-chain components rather than 1,500 isolated files.
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04
Carried the same technical foundation into follow-on utilities, including dynamic traits, animation surfaces, and Pizza Pets.
The achievement
1,500 inscriptions shipped on Bitcoin. Pizza Ninja #1 later sold for $139,700 at Sotheby’s.
The launch did more than place a collection on Bitcoin. It established an extensible on-chain codebase: the official project now exposes more than 2,000 traits, recursive endpoints, animation utilities, and on-chain emulators. The first piece then crossed into a Sotheby’s Bitcoin Ordinals auction and achieved a $139,700 sale.
- The original 1,500-piece run shipped through a custom Bitcoin inscription pipeline built for changing network conditions.
- The recursive system grew into a wider product surface spanning composable traits, animation, customization, emulators, and games.
- Pizza Ninja #1 entered Sotheby’s Bitcoin Ordinals auction and sold for $139,700.
System
Public evidence