Since there have been some tweets, I thought it would be useful to write a post about how ordinals came to be, and who was involved.
https://t.co/pFe6PraZBa
The blog post goes into more detail, but to get to the point, @rocktoshi21 is not a co-founder of ordinals.
I was personal friends with him long before ordinals, and he did hang out in the Discord in the early days with me and Raph. However, he is not the reason I started working on Bitcoin NFTs, which is not a novel idea, not the reason I put the content in Bitcoin script, and he did not contribute any meaningful ideas. He also did not contribute any code, because he cannot code at all, and his only PR in the `ord` repo is a typo fix.
Rocktoshi *was* one of the four co-founders of Ordinals Corporation, an ill-conceived startup I formed in February 2023 and dissolved less than three months later. The company was conceived of and created after the protocol had already been developed, launched, and became successful. It had nothing to do with the protocol, and was created mainly because of a vague notion that forming a startup was what one does in such circumstances.
Soon after ordcorp was formed, it became clear that rocktoshi could not be relied upon or trusted. I told him that I no longer wished to work with him, but he continued to be unreasonable, culminating with an unhinged demand to be paid $5 million dollars in exchange for his equity in the company. Equity which, I should mention, did not exist, since none had been issued, and was in a completely worthless and dysfunctional entity.
Even after we finally settled the dissolution of ordinals corporation, he kept up a steady pace of emailing me threats, demands, insults, and emotional appeals for months.
There are many people in the ecosystem who have dealt with rocktoshi, and every single one I've talked to have had similar prolonged sagas of being threatened, lied to, manipulated, and cheated.
Rocktoshi has used his proximity to me to embed himself in the ecosystem, and I regret not speaking out earlier, as others have done.
Some of the tweets that people have already made publicly are linked below.
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