Bitcoin Inventor Satoshi Now Holds Last Runestone Ordinal – Here’s Why

The creators of Runestone, a popular Bitcoin Ordinals project, sent the original “parent” text worth $525,000 at 8 BTC on Wednesday to a wallet said to be owned by legendary Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto.

The Runestone—Ordinals text 63,026,232, the largest text mined to date at around 4MB—was sent to Satoshi's wallet by project contributor and anonymous NFT historian Leonides. Leonidas tweeted that the move was a mistake and that he could do nothing to respond to Ordinals' text.

But in the end, the post was a very real-looking joke shared this week by a Solana meme coin developer named Slerf, after that developer legally burned a large chunk of its token distribution. As careful Crypto Twitter users noted, Leonidas was simply remembering.

“People I'm crazy about. I burned a Runestone parent text worth 8 BTC. The transaction is already mined so I can't return it,” he tweeted, reminiscent of the original Slurp tweet. “There's nothing I can do to fix this. I'm so sorry.”

So why was the valuable Ordinals asset sent to the wallet of the creator of the Bitcoin pseudonym, who has not been identified and has not been heard from for more than 13 years? Leonidas said that he eventually “burned” or effectively destroyed the inscriptions by making them inaccessible, preventing any further changes to the collection.

“The runestone hoard is the parent text, so by burning it, we sealed the hoard onto the chain,” Leonidas said. “Now there are only 112,384 Runestones that will ever exist.”

The parent/child text makes the third-generation text the “grandchild” of the original ordinal, indicating how the history of the ordinal is established and sought. In the case of the Runestone, when it is now burned, no future or “child” writings can be created or associated with it.

As Leonidas explained, the process of sending the Runestone to Satoshi's wallet was done by partnering with Ordinals Bot and Marathon Digital Holdings to develop the Runestone text.

While the massive Runestone itself took two blocks of Bitcoin, OrdinalsBot co-founder Brufstar said that sending the text to Satoshi is no different than sending regular transactions.

“It's just because of the way the Ordinals protocol works,” Brufstar said. “These things are written during the transaction with the Ordinals Index as they go through those transactions. What I sent you is actually just a Satoshi,” he said, referring to Bitcoin's minor dominance. (Yes, it's named after the creator of Bitcoin.)

“It's always been part of our design that this block is transferred to Satoshi's wallet at the end of the process,” added Toby Lewis, Head of Strategy at OrdinalsBot.

Last week, the much-anticipated runestone climate took place, sending 112,383 articles to eligible wallets for being early believers in the Ordinals movement and capturing the inscriptions in the first year of the protocol.

“Remember you earned your Runestone by showing up and participating in Ordinals when no one else did,” Leonidas said. “This was the only way to get a Runestone, and there was no group placement or pre-sale.”

After the airdrop, over 83,000 wallets contain the Runestone text. Runestone stock is currently at a floor price of 0.0526 BTC, about $3,445, with a total trade volume of 882 BTC ($57.8 million) today on Magic Eden's Bitcoin Marketplace.

Edited by Andrew Hayward.