Bitcoin Ordinals Project Runestone, led by NFT historian and casual collector Leonides, is preparing to launch its first airdrop.
The Runestone Project is garnering a lot of buzz because of its pedigree—Leonidas says it's a pre-Runes project, and Casey Rodermore's vision for bitcoin tokens—but Runestone owners can see the full runes at once. The protocol will come online after Bitcoin's halving later this year.
Runestone ordinary texts are trading heavily on exchanges such as the Wells Market in anticipation of the event. Although the number of Runestone inscriptions is limited, the current pre-market floor price on the Solana-based Decentralized Sales Wells Market website is $545.
“It's a decentralized, 100% volunteer effort — I tweeted the idea last month to do a big airdrop for an Ordinal community reward,” Leonidas told Decrypt. “There is no team classification, no body behind it, no facility and no roadmap.
“More than a dozen different companies have contributed funds, engineering resources, etc. to the Ordinals ecosystem.
To see if an address is eligible for airdrop, users need to copy their Bitcoin address into the Runestone airdrop interface.
The Runestone page on the OKx exchange website states that “the correct address for a Runestone airdrop should contain inscriptions in block 826,600.”
Runestone airdrop provisions include containing at least three texts, excluding file types starting with “text/plain” or “application/json”.
Leonidas says the runestone's logic is simple.
“The main use case for blockchains right now – not forever – is ‘numbers scaling'. Leonidas tweeted on Thursday that the very real ‘numbers rise' non-utility meme coins. “The world's top blockchain should have the world's top meme coin. The world's top meme coin should be distributed in a massive free airdrop without any group classification to the most established community.”
112,383 addresses qualified for the Runestone airdrop. According to Leonidas, each address receives one Runestone.
Eligible texts also include the so-called curses suggested by Ord. Cursed texts, also known as cursive writings, refer to formal rituals that the Ordu Index initially ignored, keeping them out of sight in wallets and marketplaces. Cursed ordinals receive a negative number until they are resolved.
According to the NFT marketplace Magic Eden, there are currently more than 74,000 cursed articles.
“The originals don't index the originals; the new versions do,” Leonidas previously told Decrypt.
The name Runestone is intended to position the project as the developer of the Rodarmore Ordinals protocol within the highly anticipated Runes fungible token standard. Leonidas confirms that the Runestone is part of the Runes ecosystem, but not a Runes token – yet.
“The Runes ecosystem is currently the main protocol for KC, and also includes companies such as browsers, DX, [and] Wallets to support it and pre-Runes projects with plans to release Runes tokens when the protocol is released,” Leonidas explained. “Runestone is a pre-runes project where the runestone text people receive in the airdrop will be converted into a Rune token on the Casey Rune protocol when it is released in 8 weeks.”
As Leonidas explained earlier, “Runes are not until the protocol actually fails and the first Runes token is actually generated on the chain.
He was responding to the team behind the uncorrelated Runecoin project, where 21,000 RSIC tokens were issued to the Ordinal community in January.
“The way the RSIC airdrop by @rune_coin was done is really neat, and I hope it becomes a trend for the Ordinals community, but this kind of transaction needs to be called out,” Leonidas tweeted at the time. “Obviously not the first rune on Bitcoin … no project should make this claim until the Runes protocol is released and there is a first rune token on Bitcoin.”
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