BitMEX Founder Launches Airheads NFT Collection

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 various levels of financial success. In a recent blog post, Hayes described the characters as a “playful but degenerate” cast reminiscent of American artist Jeff Koons.

AirHeads is a collaborative effort with Oyl Wallet, which launched last week and has 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 exclusively available through the wallet.

Characters in the collection vary in “fatness” based on the amount of Bitcoin and other assets, such as Ordinals or Runes, held in the Oyl wallet minting the NFT. There are 10 tiers, each representing the “size and value” of the minter’s digital portfolio. The collection humorously calls for an end to “rich oppression” and encourages holders to showcase their wealth without shame.

There are 25 “packaging” variants assigned randomly, including rarer elements granted to lower tiers to enhance rarity and value. Special characters will also be distributed equally across the 10 tiers. Cole Jorissen, the creative director of AirHeads and chief product officer at Oyl, explained that the project celebrates "wealth as a character-feature," noting that “fatness” serves as 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 stated in his post. “I want to demonstrate what’s possible on Bitcoin using Ordinals technology.”

This sentiment was echoed by BRC20 creator Domo, who acknowledged Oyl's technical contributions, stating, "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, led by Arca, with additional investment 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 the Bitcoin-focused DeFi platform OmniSat.