Arthur Hayes: Why Did I Develop the Ordinals Project Airheads?
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Arthur Hayes: Why Did I Develop the Ordinals Project Airheads?
I want to create authentic digital art, which I define as demonstrating a new way of expressing human creativity.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Arthur Hayes, Founder of BitMEX
Translation: Deng Tong, Jinse Finance
What's the point? Why do you work so hard?
The point is to feed yourself and your family, to clothe them and house them. But once your income covers basic needs, what then is the meaning of life? In an age of thinking machines and abundant hydrocarbon energy, with so much material wealth already available, why do we still work so hard?
The purpose of human existence lies in consuming art. Art comes in many forms, but fundamentally, it is an experience created by humans to entertain others. It is entirely useless, yet simultaneously priceless.
Let’s examine some traditional art forms and discuss their utility.
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Sports — an activity where humans play games while wasting energy for the entertainment of spectators.
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Dining out — an activity where humans enhance the flavor of food so they can enjoyably consume calories to sustain life.
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Listening to music — music has no purpose beyond enjoyment.
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Dancing — humans expend valuable energy moving their bodies purely for fun.
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Viewing visual art — involves visual objects created by humans for others’ appreciation.
Collectively, these activities constitute the bulk of human culture. Culture gives life value, and thus, human culture fuels economic activity worth trillions of dollars. Clearly, platforms enabling cultural consumption and preservation hold immense value.
Consuming culture via public blockchains in a way that preserves scarcity while allowing infinite scalability will attract the next billion users to cryptocurrency. This was the dream behind the 2021 non-fungible token (NFT) bull market.
Source: The Block
Despite the impressive first NFT bull run, what were people actually trading? People promised to buy, sell, and store these new digital artworks in a decentralized manner. However, upon closer inspection, many collections turned out to be combinations of scarce fungible digital tokens pointing to centralized databases storing the artwork. Your pixelated PFP likely points to a database owned and operated by a centralized entity. If, for any reason, that database ceases to be maintained, your "asset" instantly becomes worthless.
In 2023, Bitcoin Ordinals emerged suddenly as a means to create digital artifacts that exist purely on the Bitcoin blockchain. As long as we revere Satoshi, data inscribed on the blockchain—called Ordinals—will persist. Ordinals do not require applications outside the Bitcoin blockchain to exist or endure.
Ordinals bring culture to Bitcoin—the most widely used and valuable public blockchain. That’s why, when sales of crypto digital art rise amid growing crypto wealth effects, Ordinals will lead the way. Ordinals trading volume will surge, and community creativity will flourish. The best thing about Ordinals is that no one can remove them, regardless of how foolish or offensive some may find the inscribed art.
At Maelstrom, I tasked Akshat Vaidya, head of our investment team, to fund an Ordinals project. After thorough research, we invested in the Oyl wallet. To show artists what’s possible with Ordinals technology and Oyl wallet features, I collaborated on creating an Ordinals project called Airheads.
I wanted to create authentic digital art, which I define as showcasing a new form of human creative expression. I instructed the Oyl team to build a series that could only be achieved using Ordinals technology. Oyl’s talented creatives came up with the concept of Airheads.
Fugazi Finance
The entire world instinctively recognizes that the current stage of human civilization is fake. The senseless destruction of World War II gave rise to many technologies powering modern civilization. Peaceful, safe, and nearly carbon-free nuclear energy can generate gigawatts of electricity. Billions of people can fly commercially around the world. Of course, the most important outcome of war was the creation of a new type of silicon-based life—we call them thinking machines or computers.
After the war, population growth and relative human wealth increased dramatically. But the easy things have been done. Now, politicians print money to justify their existence and engage in various activities that impose a net drag on the human condition. Green energy might be the greatest misinvestment globally in this era. Because we have cheap and abundant capital—merely a derivative of cheap and abundant hydrocarbons—politicians believe they can dictate natural laws, rather than the other way around. Adopting low-density energy sources like wind and solar and expecting them to naturally replace higher-density sources like coal, natural gas, and oil will never happen naturally. By “naturally,” I mean without government subsidies or below-market interest rate loans.
The green energy scam is just one example. Many of you lament inflation since the U.S.-led Pax Moneta abandoned the gold standard in 1971. Forget government-manipulated year-over-year inflation statistics. The nominal price of a loaf of bread is higher today than yesterday. In an age of advanced technology and cheap energy, it didn’t have to be this way.
No matter how elites deceive you, you know this deep down.
Your response is speculation. Your response is buying magical internet money. Your response is inflating the “scarce” digital cultural forms you understand and appreciate.
Airheads is a series that leverages the inflation imposed upon us by the elite class. It does so both aesthetically and technically.
Aesthetically, Airheads is a character series based on balloons. Imagine Jeff Koons’ balloon-like figures—playful yet decadent. These balloons metaphorically contain the inflation of our era. They are fat and beautiful because we’ve all experienced inflation.
Technically, Airheads is the first Ordinals series to use a leaderboard system where your wallet size determines your rank. Unlike other series with random attributes, Airheads has a clear hierarchy. This approach uses recursive inscriptions to push the boundaries of what collectibles can represent, making Airheads the only series truly designed for early investors who took the greatest risks.
Details
Airheads are unique Bitcoin Ordinals designed to display and flaunt your wealth. Each Airhead is an inflated balloon-like character generated using recursive art to visually represent the size and value of your digital portfolio at the time of minting. There are 10,000 Airheads available, with characters differentiated through sequential ranking and tiering to reflect asset weightings on the leaderboard—making it a fun and competitive way to showcase wealth.
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Special Characters and Tiers: Airheads are evenly distributed across 10 tiers, each representing different levels of portfolio size. Some of the most exciting characters may appear in lower tiers, adding surprise and value elements.
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Wrapper Variants: Each Airhead is wrapped in one of 25 mysterious wrapper variants, randomly assigned. Some wrappers match themes across tiers, making them unexpectedly rare and more desirable.
Overall, it looks something like this sexy Airhead. Note that certain body parts are naturally large; some characters are simply constructed differently ;).
How to Get an Airhead?
To obtain an Airhead, you have several options:
Whitelist Application:
The whitelist opens on August 6. Apply using the Oyl wallet. Follow @airheadfun on Twitter and complete tasks to earn XP (experience points). Even with a small wallet, you can earn big. Participate and climb the leaderboard as you complete each task. All applicants winning allocations must pay the minting fee.
Compete on the Leaderboard:
Bring your Bitcoin, Ordinals, BRC-20s, and Runes to climb the rankings. Aim to accumulate the largest portfolio within the Oyl ecosystem to earn the most impressive and inflated Airheads, reflecting your top position on the leaderboard. The larger your portfolio, the higher your rank, and the more prestigious your Airhead. You must rank within the top 10,000 to receive an allocation.
Buy a Whale Pass for 0.069 BTC:
Guarantee yourself an Airhead by purchasing a Whale Pass. Send the Whale Pass to a whale wallet (like your vault or distributed ledger). When that whale wallet activates it by sending it to an Oyl wallet, all assets in the sending taproot address will count toward your leaderboard position, giving you a significant advantage (if you truly are a whale).
Earn XP and Rank Up
XP is earned by holding and increasing Bitcoin, Ordinals, BRC-20, and Runes assets. More than 15 eligible assets across BRC-20, Runes, and Ordinal collections qualify for earning XP. This boosts your leaderboard ranking and helps you become the fattest, most inflated Airhead. The goal is to accumulate the largest portfolio and flex your wealth.
Install the Oyl Wallet
Get the Oyl wallet from the Chrome Web Store and explore its in-wallet trading experience at Oyl.io. Prepare for the whitelist opening on August 6 by creating or importing your wallet, then transfer Bitcoin, Ordinals, BRC-20s, and Runes. Once the whitelist opens, watch your XP accumulate and climb the leaderboard to gain a chance to mint an Airhead.
Tithe
People in religious professions often say 10% of your income should be donated to churches, synagogues, mosques, etc. Traditionally, Maelstrom will pay a tithe to Lord Satoshio using funds raised from the Airhead airdrop. A portion of the proceeds will support our Bitcoin developer grant program.
Future
My goal is to demonstrate what’s possible with Bitcoin Ordinals technology and the user-friendly Oyl wallet. I sincerely hope artists take notice and draw inspiration from this series to realize their contributions to the human experience. If Airheads inspires others, it will cement its status as a pioneering collection and retain value for a long time.
We all know the corrupt elites parading around the world in our name will not stop printing money. We know the human suffering caused by inflation will continue to grow. But at least we can have some fun—inflate our Airheads, make them very fat, and tell those who despise crypto to go please my Airhead.
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Arthur Hayes
