A year after the first Ordinal NFTs were minted on Bitcoin, the enthusiasm around inscriptions remains strong. The Ordinals ecosystem has evolved significantly since Casey Rodarmor launched the protocol, inspiring a whole host of other developments that have carried over into the Ordinals collections of today.
But of course, the Ordinals community wouldn’t be what it is today without the early involvement of many artists and creators who believed in the protocol’s potential.
Paz, co-creator of the Ordinal Faces collection, was one of them. Ordinal Faces were one of the first inscription collections to hit the Bitcoin blockchain in the initial rush of Ordinals-inspired art. The collection of 50 pixelated faces helped demonstrate the versatility of Ordinals and played its own part in drawing crypto users to the Bitcoin ecosystem.
To mark the anniversary of Ordinal Faces, we spoke to Paz about the inspiration behind Ordinal Faces the importance of teaching others about the Bitcoin blockchain.
The Intersection of Bitcoin Ordinals and Bitcoin Education
Leather: How did you begin creating Web3 art?
Paz: I started during the pandemic in 2021. At the time, I had a few friends who were creating Web3 art and I got into NFTs.
But I didn't create my own pieces until Ordinals came out. That was mainly because at the time, the NFT market was really saturated and I liked the fact that Ordinals were on-chain and would last for basically as long as Bitcoin lasts. It was a new space that allowed for new upcoming artists, so I went for it.
Leather: What inspired you to make Ordinal Faces?
Paz: First, I want to give a shout-out to my co-creator Bones World. Ordinal Faces was a collaboration between us. He was the one who designed the actual faces, and I was the one who added the visual effects to make them into glitch art.
Ordinal Faces is a collection of 50 pixel art faces that kind of resemble an old digital style of art. It was inspired by two things: the first was everything that was being inscribed at the time, which felt like very retro-style inscriptions. We wanted to add to that by creating a very retro punk style collection. The second was a design that my co-creator made for his own brand a year prior. We pretty much based the whole collection off of that design.
Leather: What sort of message did you want to get across with Ordinal Faces?
Paz: We wanted to focus on the intersection of Bitcoin education and art. I wanted to show that it's fairly easy for any artist to come into the space, make their own art, and inscribe it. With NFTs, I feel like the process can be pretty hard and it's not something that's stored forever like Ordinals are.
Leather: Why is Bitcoin education important to you?
Paz: I think being able to have something that lives on long after we’re gone is really valuable. I hope that if people also see the value in that, they would be interested in inscribing their own art.
Leather: What is one thing that people often don't know about your project?
Paz: We were the second-ever gif collection within Ordinals. The file sizes were pretty large in terms of what people inscribe now as we were inscribing upwards of 200 kilobytes per file, and that was mostly because the pieces were in gif form.
We haven't really publicly stated that we're making continuing designs for Ordinal Faces, but it is on our minds. If we do it, we would want to do it well.
Leather: What are some things that you want to experiment with?
Paz: I think a pretty cool thing would be to do something with block numbers, something like having the art change with the block number. So perhaps an Ordinal Face that changes with time. But at the same time, I think simplicity is always good. So, who knows?
We're in a state that nobody has really seen before, and I'm just excited to see how people react to Ordinals and the new tech that is going to be built off of it. It's not just going to be images or art, I think it'll be much more. It definitely has a lot of promise.
