Author: 0xSea.eth, co-sponsor of theNextDAO Source: X (original Twitter) @_0xSea_

If Ordinals and Atomicals, the two strongest protocols in BTC L1 at present, were both born when no one cared about them, then Runes was launched under the attention of the entire industry. As the founder of the Ordinals protocol that opened the "Pandora's Box" of the Bitcoin ecosystem, Casey Rodarmor (@rodarmor) attracted the attention of the entire ecosystem after announcing the launch of the Runes protocol in September last year.

Now, with only two months until the official launch of Runes, what alpha opportunities are there?

1/ Why are there Runes

In the previous article"A 60-year-old grandma can also understand In the first chapter of "A Brief History of the New BTC L1 Protocol", we mentioned that Casey first created the Ordinals protocol for the purpose of uploading artworks/NFTs to the chain, not for issuing coins. But then the emergence of BRC-20 broke this situation, and the transaction volume of BRC-20 has always dominated the entire Ordinals protocol. But as BRC-20 exploded in two waves last year, the industry accepted the existence of this inscription token, and Casey also changed his view: Although 99% of tokens are scams and gimmicks, they, like casinos, will not disappear. Creating a good token protocol for Bitcoin may bring significant transaction fee revenue to Bitcoin, attract more developers and users, and ultimately expand the usage of BTC. So on September 26, 2023, Casey published Runes' idea in full for the first time through his blog, which is to build a new homogeneous token (token) protocol on Bitcoin. Article link: https://rodarmor.com/blog/runes/

In this article, he pointed out that BRC-20, RGB, Taproot Assets, etc. There are some issues with the protocol, and it is proposed that a better BTC token protocol should be simple, not dependent on off-chain services, and based on UTXO. This is the core idea and origin of Runes. The Chinese community generally calls it "Rune Protocol" . By the way, the unofficial symbol for Runes is ▣, while the symbol for Ordinals is ◉

2/ When will Runes be launched

Just five days before Casey published the article, on September 21, the atomic protocol @atomicalsxyz also released the first token $atom within five hours with proof of work (PoW). The way was completed by free mint, bringing another innovation to Bitcoin L1. Therefore, in the following months, the market also had great expectations for Runes, and many people were making various preparations to grab the first token on the Runes protocol.

However, in the past few months, the Casey team has to maintain the normal upgrade of Ordinals on the one hand, and also deal with issues such as cursed inscriptions (introduction article: https ://twitter.com/_0xSea_/status/1743512063593546052) The launch time of Runes has not been determined due to emergencies caused by strange bugs. It was not until December 16 that Casey announced the time when the Runes protocol would be launched on the main network at the Taipei Blockchain Week event. It was released at the Bitcoin block height of 840,000, which is the time of the fourth BTC halving. The time is approximately Will be in late April.

Now, there are less than 2 months until Runes is officially released. I hope Casey has completed the game Baldur's Gate 3 and will not delay the release of Runes

3/ But it seems that there are already several agreements called Runes

As mentioned above, Casey announced his idea for Runes on September 26, and has been updating the code for Runes on Github for several months. Although the Runes protocol has not been officially launched, many developers want to do things based on it.

There are two categories here, one is to make Runes-like protocols, and the other is to make specific projects. Let’s talk about the protocol category first. There are two main projects: The first is the @PipeBtc protocol issued by Benny. It is the first protocol based on the idea of ​​Runes, and it moves very quickly. If you don’t know Benny, you can read the article "A brief history of the new BTC L1 protocol that a 60-year-old grandma can understand", Benny is a technical speculator who is energetic, has many ideas, and has issued multiple coins. .

The second one was launched by @runealpha_btc in December, similar to Pipe. The first token on Runealpha is Cook, but it does not limit the total amount of tokens and the number of tokens. Instead, it limits the number of blocks to 150 (equivalent to a time limit). Mint will count as long as it is within the block range. I saw Runealpha’s financing BP through other channels last week. The project’s next positioning is to become the infrastructure of the Runes protocol, including browsers, indexes, trading platforms, etc. The $Cook token should also be migrated to the Runes protocol, but the specific rules have not yet been determined.

4/ There are also some Runes concept projects

In addition to the protocol classes mentioned above, the The second category is specific projects. These projects have all emerged in the past 1-2 months. The main logic is: before Runes is officially released at block 840,000, use the strong market expectations to preview, do things in advance, and first issue NFT on Ordinals to establish The community builds consensus, and after the Runes protocol is officially deployed, project tokens will be issued on the Runes protocol and airdropped to NFT holders. Below I list some such projects that I am concerned about. Please forgive me if there are any omissions. You are welcome to add them in the reply area below.

1) RSIC

RSIC is the abbreviation of Rune Specific Inscription Circuits. This is an NFT on Ordinals with a total supply of 21,000 pieces, 10% of which is provided by the project. reserve. 90% of the RSIC was airdropped to shareholders by the project team at their own expense, costing more than 3 BTC, and was praised by the community for its large scale. The specific airdrop rules and standards have not been announced, and it is speculated that it is mainly based on the blue-chip NFT held by the wallet. Because it is an airdrop, some wallets do not know that they have obtained the NFT, so they need to make a transfer (buy, sell/transfer to yourself) before it can be activated. After activation, "mining" begins. What is mined is the token share of a certain token that the project will deploy in Runes in the future. This also fully shows that the RSIC project team is the OG of the Ordinals ecosystem, otherwise it would be difficult to get rapid support from the Ordiscan browser. Due to space limitations, more details about RSIC will not be discussed here. Those who are interested can check out @lilyanna_btc’s ​​previous article: https://twitter.com/lilyanna_btc/status/1749639096853745957

· Official recommendation: @rune_coin

· Official website: https://runecoin.io

· More documents: https://ordiscan.com/inscription/126 You can browse its multiple child inscriptions (Child inscriptions) here to dig out more interesting details

· Magic Eden collection: https://magiceden.io/ordinals/marketplace/rsic

· Mining query: available at http://ordiscan.com After entering the wallet address, search in the Runes column

2) RSIC

Boost RSIC Boost is an additional tool launched by the RSIC project. This time it is not an airdrop, but you need to hold a wallet with RSIC to mint (it costs more than ~$170). By putting it in the wallet, you can speed up the mining process of RSIC. This move further screened out the active wallets on the chain, increased the market game play, and once again proved that the project team is very good at causing trouble.

The current total amount is 3.9K, Magic Eden collection: https://magiceden.io/ordinals/marketplace/rsic-boost

3) Rune Mania Miner

Sure enough, soon a project will give RSIC Boost holders (equivalent to also Holding RSIC) issued an airdrop, and this project is Rune Mania Miner. There are 3,800 tickets in total, 3,547 are airdropped to the community and 253 are reserved by the team. Like RSIC, it also needs to be transferred once (you can also transfer it to yourself) before it can be activated for mining.

· Official recommendation: @RuneManiaMiner

· Official website/document: https://ord .io/61549984

· Magic Eden Collection: https://magiceden.io/ordinals/marketplace/rmm

· Mining query: None

4) Runestone

Runestone is another airdrop project that has attracted much attention after RSIC, and is led by @LeonidasNFT, a well-known KOL in the Ordinals field. In the past 2 weeks, Leonidas has raised funds from the industry through RSIC also provided a donation of 0.15 BTC.

At the same time, Ruestone’s airdrop rules are relatively transparent, that is, at block height 826,600, the wallet needs to hold 3 inscriptions, but the following must be excluded. Inscriptions starting with "text/plain" or "application/json", such as BRC-20, do not count.

Currently, the number of whitelist wallet addresses announced by Runestone has reached 113,376, and the scale of airdrops is unprecedented. Once everything is ready, a formal airdrop should be carried out in the near future.

· Check whether it is in the whitelist: via https://runestone.lfg.cash or https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FKJd0h6O5X1R0ooNBx2pH47xi3CsCY8xczhI25YROVw /edit#

· Magic Eden collection: None

· Mining query: None None

5) The Rune Guardians

Guardians also play similar to RSIC, to Ordinals Blue-chip NFT holders are airdropped, and the project party bears all gas costs, but the specific rules have not been announced.

· Official recommendation: @RuneGuardians

· Official website: http://theruneguardians.com

· Magic Eden Collection: https://magiceden.io/ordinals/marketplace/trg

· Mining query: None

In addition to the several projects mentioned above, I have also participated in several other fee-based projects, such as RuneDogecoin is a ladder Charged mint and then airdropped, but lacked specific products and roadmaps; Genesis Runes was promoted as free as an attraction, but in fact it charged a "developer fee" of $50 for each ticket, and the total amount was exceeded to 33.7K. Later, There are some repurchases + destructions, but the total amount is still as high as 29.9k, and the current price has broken.

5/ So how to participate in Runes?

Okay, back to Runes itself.

Casey also noticed that the hype about Runes in the market is already very hot, and many project parties want to grab the first token, so Casey recently decided that he It will deploy tokens No. 0-9 by itself, and the specific names are being solicited from the community. Moreover, when Runes was first launched, the length of all token names was from 12 digits and above. Token lengths within 12 digits will be gradually released, allowing projects in need to pay (burn) to have shorter token tickers. . The picture below was posted by Casey last October. Now the price of BTC has nearly doubled.

So, after Runes is officially launched, there are several ways to participate in Runes:

1) Directly mint No. 0-9 deployed by the Casey team The first 10 tokens, the names are to be determined. And due to the high attention of Runes and the complete infrastructure ecology of Ordinals, it is estimated that many generation tools will support it immediately, and there should be no need for a local BTC full node. It is estimated that a gas war will occur for a period of time.

2) Hold NFTs or certificates of the above-mentioned and other "pre-mining projects" launched in the next 2 months, and wait for the project to be launched After deploying the corresponding token on Runes, you will directly receive the corresponding airdrop.

6/ What is the relationship between Runes and Ordinals and BRC-20?

With Runes going online, we can take another look at the BTC layer protocol landscape.

Previously I thought Runes was a protocol parallel to Ordinals, but I recently discovered that this is not the case. Runes and Ordinals share a Github code base, and structurally, Runes and Inscriptions are at the same level. To put it more bluntly, Runes and BRC-20 are token protocols of the same level, and both belong to the Ordinals ecosystem. But from the perspective of the Casey team: BRC-20 is an "unofficial" token protocol, while Runes is more like an "official" token protocol.

The competition between Runes and BRC-20 is about to begin, and Runes will attract more people to deploy/hype altcoins in the short term. Of course, BRC-20’s ordi is still the first altcoin on Bticoin, which is an undisputed fact.

In addition, I am also concerned about whether Runes, in addition to being a "coin issuance protocol", has some undisclosed features beyond those mentioned in previous blog posts. As for innovation, I'm afraid we have to wait until Runes is officially released to see it.

7/ Finally

Overall, based on the appeal of Casey’s team and the improvement of Ordinals infrastructure, Runes has the opportunity to trigger the third wave of BTC ecological boom.