Arthur Hayes and Oyl launch whitelist for Bitcoin Ordinal NFT collection 'AirHeads'

BitMEX founder Arthur Hayes has officially opened the whitelist for “Airheads,” his inaugural Bitcoin Ordinals NFT collection.

The collection features balloon-like characters inflated to different sizes, symbolizing different levels of financial success. In a recent blog post, Hayes described the characters as a “playful but degenerate” cast of characters whose style and appearance are reminiscent of American artist Jeff Koons.

AirHeads is a collaborative effort with Oyl Wallet, which launched last week and boasts Hayes' family office, Maelstrom, as an investor. Oyl offers in-wallet whitelisting and minting capabilities, and the whitelist for the 10,000-piece “AirHeads” collection is available exclusively through the wallet.

The collection distributes characters of varying degrees of “fatness” depending on how much Bitcoin and other assets, such as Ordinals or Runes, are in the Oyl wallet that’s minting the NFT. There are 10 tiers, with each representing “the size and value” of the minter’s digital portfolio. The collection playfully calls for an end to “rich oppression” and encourages holders to display their wealth without shame.

There are 25 “packaging” variants that will be assigned randomly, with some of the rarer elements being granted to lower tiers to increase their rarity and value. There are also special characters that are distributed equally across the 10 tiers. Cole Jorissen, the creative director of AirHeads and chief product officer at Oyl, explained the project celebrates "wealth as a character-feature," adding "fatness" is "a metaphor for wealth."

“These characters use sequential ranking and tier differentiation to reflect asset weightings … making them a fun and competitive way to display your wealth,” Hayes said in his post. “I want to demonstrate what’s possible on Bitcoin using Ordinals technology.”

It was a point echoed by BRC20 creator Domo who noted Oyl's technical contribution to the space, saying in the press release, "Oyl’s indexing tools make it much easier for builders to create new protocols on Bitcoin. We could see a boom in protocol development as a result."

Earlier this year, Oyl raised $3 million in pre-seed funding in a round led by Arca, with additional funds raised from Arthur Hayes’s Maelstrom and Domo. Oyl is building a trading platform for the Bitcoin ecosystem, including a market aggregation tool for BRC-20 tokens, in-wallet trading features for Bitcoin and integration with a Bitcoin-focused DeFi platform OmniSat.