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With Bitcoin halving only hours away, the race is on to tackle the first signs of the new Bitcoin Runes protocol, which will launch alongside the quadrennial event.
Runes is a new funnel token protocol on Bitcoin that allows users to “etch” and mint tokens at the top of the chain. It's similar to the experimental BRC-20 standard launched last year, but it's said to be more efficient—and it comes from the creator of the Ordinals protocol.
In any case, like NFT-like Ordinals before it, the project's creators wanted to preserve some of the early tokens possible.
“Collectors and diggers love low numbers,” Leonides, a pseudonymous NFT historian, told Decrypt. “In terms of texts, some of the more expensive collections had fewer numbers.”
As Leonidas explains, the number of sub-10,000 texts accurately conveys that an ordinary project preceded the protocol. With the provenance emphasis around blockchain and many early NFT and token projects benefiting from being early adopters, innovators and traders alike will see the opportunity to be the first in this anticipated new token protocol.
Runes is a new protocol from Ordinals creator Kay Rodermore. Ordinary Mountain has enabled the creation of NFT-like “texts” on the Bitcoin network and BRC-20 standard-enabled fungibles on top of it. Runes is seen by many Bitcoiners as the next step for Bitcoin tokens.
Like first edition books, physical art, and NFT collections like CryptoPunks and Solana Monkey Business, collectors value collectibles based on their rarity or age.
As developers scramble to forge the first runes, Leonidas expects millions of dollars to be spent on fees to maintain these low rune numbers. Runestone, currently the largest Ordinals project with market capitalization (and helped by Leonidas) is set to be one of those projects for the upcoming meme coin launch.
“Runestone spends more than $100,000 per transaction to get a low number for the Dog meme coin,” he said.
Earlier this month, Leonidas announced that the dog meme coin would be going live after 112,383 Runestone inscription owners launched the Runes Protocol.
“Casey developed a method similar to the Runes where they are counted according to the order in which they were created,” he said. “It's just a number, so it's not the end all, be all – but if a project gets a low rune number, that's great.”
In addition to fighting over the original Runes, Bitcoin mining pools are also trying to capture the “epic satoshi,” or a limited version of Bitcoin's smallest denomination (1/100,000,000 BTC).
“According to ‘ordinals theory,' the first satoshi in a half is called an ‘epic satoshi,'” said Will Foxley, co-founder of Blockspace Media. A standard satoshi on it will command a high market premium due to its rarity.
According to Nick Hansen, CEO of Luxor Mining Pool, it's not just about capturing the rare or epic sat, it's about the potential windfall.
“For reference, a rare sat goes from $200 to $500 depending on market variance; we've seen rare sats sell for up to three bitcoins ($193,242),” Hanson told Decrypt. But it's a logarithmic scale. [sat] 4 to 6 million dollars.[that's] Probably market value for that.
Edited by Andrew Hayward.
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