9,000 hand-drawn faces inscribed straight onto Bitcoin — some living on satoshis mined by Satoshi Nakamoto and Hal Finney themselves. The loudest voices in Bitcoin called it pollution. Tony Tafuro kept drawing. The chain kept the record.
In January 2023, ordinal theory gave every satoshi an identity — a serial number assigned by mining order, trackable forever. Inscriptions completed it: data written permanently into a transaction’s witness and bound to a specific sat. No server hosts the art. No URL points at it. The artifact is the chain, replicated on every full node on earth.
Sats from historic blocks — mined by Satoshi, by Hal Finney — become identifiable, holdable relics of the genesis era. OMB is built directly on this.
Inscription data lives inside the witness of a taproot spend — consensus-protected space. Fully on-chain. No pointer, no IPFS, no promise.
Controlled by keys, transferred like the coin it rides on. No platform, no enforced royalties, no admin. Ownership with no asterisk.
OMB was assembled in a single obsessive month. A pseudonymous ex–Wall Street founder, ZK Shark, barely slept through February 2023, quit finance, and drove the project to launch that March. The art itself — every hand-drawn face, mantra and ₿ mark that gave the inscription era its first true visual identity — is the work of artist Tony Tafuro, with rare-sat hunter Nullish supplying the historic coins the collection is inscribed on.
The ethos is extreme ownership: no royalties, no metadata switches, no company between the holder and the artifact. Buy it, lend it, inscribe over it, destroy it — nobody can stop you, and nobody will save you. The artwork itself is released CC0 — no rights reserved, free for anyone to use, remix or display. This vault does so directly.
It’s a movement, not a project. No roadmap, no royalties, no permission.
And in 2023 the movement produced its defining act of iconoclasm: collectors burned CryptoPunks — Ethereum’s crown jewels — for OMB allowlist spots. Punk #8611 crossed first, then #9146. The old world’s masterpieces, sacrificed for citizenship in the new one. In April 2024, Christie’s held its first-ever Ordinals auction for OMB; the featured set cleared $441,000.
An OMB’s eye colour is not a trait lottery — it records where the artifact lives on the chain. That is the collection’s masterstroke: scarcity anchored to Bitcoin’s own genesis history, verifiable by anyone, forgeable by no one. Released in separate drops over time, the tiers now total 9,000 — a movement that kept inscribing.
Beyond the eyes, every OMB belongs to a meta — a recurring character type Tafuro drew across the collection. It is where the range shows: cyberpunk grime, occult horror, junkyard humour, Bitcoin iconography, all in the same trembling ink line.
What you are scrolling is not a copy — each image is delivered from the inscription itself via an ordinals node, referenced by the collection’s own on-chain gallery. Click any piece to open its inscription record. Independent index: ord.net/collection/omb.
WITNESS is a private collection. It does not exhibit, price, or promote its holdings.