Original author: Jaleel, BlockBeats
The short-term investment asset that has not been officially released now has a market value of US$143 million.
As of the time of writing, according to Whales Market data, the highest transaction price of Runestone OTC has reached the US$1,300 range.
Leonidas, the developer of Ordinals and the founder of the Runestone project, posted on social media that block 832849 and the Runestone parent inscription (parentinscription) have been completed in cooperation with OrdinalsBot and MarathonDigitalHoldings. As the airdrop process progresses and Leonidas promotes the Runestone project, the price of Runestone OTC has been rising even though the airdrop has not yet landed.
According to the Runestone price trend line compiled by Doggfather, it can be seen that the highest price of Runestone OTC was close to US$1,600 on March 5, setting a new record for the highest valuation of Runestone.
Source: Doggfather
Most of the active Bitcoin community may have heard of this large-scale airdrop of the Runestone project, but Runestones expectations are so high, obviously not only because of its large-scale airdrop.
Want to be the top Meme on the Runestone protocol
Many early users of the Bitcoin ecosystem know that Casey has always been dissatisfied with BRC-20, the FT protocol that is parasitic on the Ordinals protocol. So in September 2023, Casey released his idea for this new FT protocol Runestone.
This new token protocol hoped to be built on Bitcoin was later called Runwen by the Chinese community. Rune is native to Bitcoin’s Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO) model. This minimizes the generation of junk UTXOs, allowing for more responsible UTXO management and a smaller on-chain footprint.
Related Reading:Before the Bitcoin Runes protocol goes online, you need to understand these contents in advance》
The consensus of the Runes protocol has been reflected in advance
On December 16 last year, Casey announced the launch time of the Runes protocol on the main network at the Taipei Blockchain Week event. It was released at the Bitcoin block height of 840,000, which is when BTC was halved for the fourth time. It will probably be in late April.
As the singularity of the Big Explosion of the Bitcoin ecosystem, Caseys influence is unparalleled in the entire Bitcoin ecosystem. The Runes protocol itself has a strong consensus.
As the consensus of the Runes protocol becomes stronger and stronger, the value of assets has been realized in advance.
According to Casey, Runes will have two distribution methods in the future: fixed total amount (project parties can pre-mine) and Open Mint (fair launch, project parties cannot pre-mine).
In order to prevent the first Rune from being snatched or pre-mined by VCs or project parties, Casey decided to hardcode the first 10 Runes (Rune 0 - Rune 9) into the Runes protocol, which only supports open mint, so that everyone can participate fairly Among them, he also solicited interesting and memeble token names, units and minting rules from the community. Here Casey mentioned several names that he thinks are interesting, such as COMMUNISTRUNE, ANARCHISTRUNE, CYPERPUNKRUNE and so on.
The name of Leonidas Runestone project is the same as the Runestone protocol. In this regard, Runestone already outperforms most projects.
According to Leonidas on social media, after being exchanged for tokens, Runestones goal is simple: to create the worlds top memecoin on the worlds top blockchain.
Comparing the existing Memes with the highest market value, Doge has a market value of US$21 billion, Shib has a market value of US$18 billion, and PEPE has a market value of US$2.8 billion. Looking at the Meme inscriptions with the largest market value in Bitcoin, ORDI has a market value of US$1.5 billion and SATS has a market value of US$1.3 billion. If Runestone wants to become a top Meme, it is expected to have 10 times the potential.
There is Cook in the front and RSIC in the back.
Although many community members will say that this was not posted by Casey himself and does not have legitimacy. But we have also seen the price support of the Runes concept, even though the projects and assets of the Runes concept currently on the market do not have legitimacy.
For example, the Runealpha protocol was released in December last year. As a fork version of the Runes protocol, Runealpha was very popular at the time. The price of Runealpha’s first token, Cook, was very high for a long time until Casey issued a clarification that neither Runealpha nor Cook had anything to do with him.
If the performance of Cook and Runealpha is not outstanding enough, then RSIC can explain this problem to a great extent.
RSIC is the abbreviation of Rune Specific Inscription Circuits. There are a total of 21,000 Ordinals NFTs. 90% of the RSIC were airdropped to holders by the project party at their own expense, costing more than 3 BTC. Due to the wide scale of airdrops and innovative airdrop forms, RSIC was even speculated by the community to be issued by Casey.
Although the specific airdrop rules and standards have not been announced, community speculation is mainly based on the blue-chip NFT held by the wallet. After RSIC is activated, it starts mining, and the locked profit is the token share of a certain token that the project party will deploy in Runes in the future.
In recent times, the single price of RSIC has remained above 0.1 BTC. Its current market value exceeds US$150 million, firmly ranking among the top five Bitcoin NFTs. At the same time, so far, the total trading volume of Runestone has reached 1.6 million US dollars, with a total volume of 110,000 pieces. Calculated at the current price of US$1,300, Runestone’s US$143 million.
This also means that before the airdrop was officially released, the market value of Runestone was already close to the market value of RSIC.
Breaking the record for the largest block in Bitcoin history
Leonidas has also done a lot of work in terms of publicity and marketing.
On March 3, Leonidas posted on the social platform that earlier today, Runestone mined the largest block in the history of Bitcoin, refreshing the record of 3.96 MB reached by Taproot Wizards, reaching a block size of 3.97 MB.
Later, TO also confirmed this on social media. He said that a top-level Bitcoin Core developer sent him a DM and he was very sure that the 3.97 MB rune stone inscription was the largest block currently.
Recall that on February 1 last year, Taproot Wizards purposefully planned the largest block and transaction in the history of Bitcoin, which also caused great shock in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Blockstream CEO Adam Back, Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dashjr and others are opposed to this, believing that this will cause the size of the Bitcoin blockchain to rapidly expand, and the equipment requirements for running full nodes will greatly increase, resulting in a reduction of full nodes in the entire network, and censorship resistance. decline. At the same time, unexpectedly huge transactions and huge blocks will impact ecological facilities such as wallets, mining pools, and browsers, causing abnormalities in some facilities, such as certain transactions failing to be parsed normally.
At that time, Udi Wertheimer, founder of Taproot Wizards, said that Bitcoin maximalists need to put down their high opinions and prejudices and accept that blockchain can be used for more than simple transactions. Bitcoin should not only be used for simple transactions, but can also achieve more functions through technological upgrades, and NFT is just one of them.
Interestingly, unlike when Udi Wertheimer faced strong opposition, now Leonidas has set a new record for the largest block in Bitcoin history through Runestone without much opposition.
Artist who carved marble gets into Bitcoin
Beyond that, the reason why the Runestone project is getting so much attention is because of the team.
Founder Leonidas Needless to say, early members of the Bitcoin ecosystem are familiar with him. Leonidas can be said to be the big OG of the Bitcoin ecosystem. He made great contributions in the early promotion process and has great influence.
Recently, Leonidas also announced their designer Léo Caillard, an artist from Paris who is famous for his carved marble sculptures. The fact that a marble carving artist came to carve the rune stones on the Bitcoin chain is very interesting in itself.
Leonidas engraving
In his social media, Léo Caillard expressed his thoughts on Bitcoin NFT and Runestone: Not too different from the lasting properties of marble, I know that using Bitcoin blocks as my medium will allow me to create our Something that future generations can appreciate.”
Just as the great marble sculptures of antiquity have been preserved for thousands of years, so too will the rune stones be preserved.
Rune stone details
Under this tweet, the official Twitter of Bitcoin Wizard NFT commented: They told me before that there are no real artists on the Bitcoin blockchain to express their recognition and tribute to art.
A gift to all early adopters
Runestone’s airdrop rules basically cover all Ordinals active users.
It is reported that the airdrop rules of Runestone are: if the address has 100 blue-chip inscriptions at the time of the snapshot, 1 runestone will be obtained; if the address contains 3 random JPEGs in the snapshot, 1 runestone will be obtained. Obviously, the algorithm of the runestone airdrop is not conducive to whales, but it is hoped to cover all early Bitcoin users as much as possible.
No pre-sale, no team allocation, no preemption, fair launch, this is the spirit that Bitcoin NFT has had from the very beginning. As the OG of the Bitcoin ecosystem, Leonidas adhered to this when launching Runestone and carried out fair and inclusive distribution.
So can Runestone, which currently has 1300 U off the court, really become the top Meme on the Runes protocol?
Before the Bitcoin halving and the official launch of the Runes protocol, the answer is difficult to say. But even if the airdrop has not yet fallen, we can indeed see the influence of Runestone in the market. Runestone has the conditions to become a top-level project on multiple levels.
