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Runes protocol startup Ordinals Explorer Ord.io is raising its treasury this weekend with Bitcoin's halving, and the company announced a $2 million fundraiser Wednesday that it says will be used to hire more developers.
Bitcoin Frontier Fund and Sora Ventures led the pre-seed funding round. Other investors include Eden Block, Arca, Longhash Ventures, Daxos Capital, Portal Ventures, UTXO Management, Rubik Ventures, VitalTao Capital, Analpha Ventures, Kommune Fund, Edessa Capital, PetRock Capital, PG Capital, Shake and Bake Productions, Re7 Capital and Balaji Fund.
In the year Launched in March 2023 by software developer Zach Meyer and eponymous NFT historian Leonidas, Ord.io allows users to discover, support, and comment on common articles.
“I'm incredibly excited about the wave of innovation and exploration that's happening in Bitcoin. Products and technologies that were previously limited to various alt chains are being redesigned and built on Bitcoin,” Mayer said in a statement.
“In past years, most of the developer excitement was focused on projects like Ethereum and Solana,” he continued, “but we're seeing Bitcoin regain its share of mind among developers.”
Collectors can sort their searches by metric, including the article's number or whether the article is “cursed” or “standard.” Cursed texts refer to ordinals which the ordinal indicator initially ignored in wallets and marketplaces.
Articles can be searched using special attributes or “Satributes” as they are called on Ord.io. For example, the text “pizza” contains the sat used to purchase the two Papa John's pizzas purchased by Laszlo Haniech in 2010.
Since the launch of the Ordinals protocol in January 2023, more than 65 million entries have been made on the Bitcoin blockchain, according to data compiled by Dune.
In September, Ordinals creator Casey Rodermore announced his plans to launch the Runes protocol to implement fungibles on the Bitcoin blockchain. Runes aim to solve many of the problems faced by ordinary texts, such as corrupted space.
The Runes protocol is set to launch alongside Bitcoin's halving, currently expected to take place on Saturday. It's said to be a more efficient way to fund bitcoin than last year's formal BRC-20 standard, which began as an experiment. Some BRC-20 tokens lost significant value during the Runes launch process.
“We believe that generating Runes will be the most popular activity on the Bitcoin network in the next year,” Ord.io co-founder Leonidas Decrypt said. “We expect Mint to account for half of all Bitcoin transactions, and we see an incredible opportunity to help build practices around adoption. That starts with availability.”
Leonidas focused on Ord.io's early rune release, underscoring his belief that Runes will become the dominant cryptographic protocol on Bitcoin. Looking to the future, Leonidis said Ord.io will continue to improve the user experience by thinking about customer needs and simplifying the platform.
“When a feature feels done, you have to force yourself to go back and find at least one way to make it better,” he said. “If you do that long enough, you can create something very special.”
While the future of Runes is unknown — despite the growing buzz surrounding its launch — Leonides says the main point of this rise is to continue building on Bitcoin.
“When someone comes to Bitcoin to collect JPEGs, trade meme coins or do DeFi, we want to be the trusted platform they come to,” he said. “It is difficult to know exactly what the landscape will look like in five years, but one thing is certain: we will still be building on Bitcoin, and only Bitcoin.”
Edited by Andrew Hayward.
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