Bitcoin's journey has evolved significantly from its inception, now embracing complex features like BRC20 tokens and Ordinals as mentioned in 10102’s Block 800k update, catalyzing debates within its community over network strain and innovation balance. Indeed, ordinals, leveraging the Taproot upgrade, mark Bitcoin's foray into NFTs, making satoshis unique digital assets with substantial opportunities for innovation and creativity.
BRC20 tokens, inspired by Ethereum's ERC20, aim to expand Bitcoin's utility to include tokenized assets and DeFi, transforming Bitcoin from merely a currency to a platform for decentralized applications.
With this evolution, concerns over network congestion and fees have surfaced. In response, Casey Rodarmor introduced Runes, proposing a more efficient alternative to BRC20 tokens by optimizing blockchain space and Unspent Transaction Outputs (UTXO) management, potentially reshaping Bitcoin's DeFi landscape.
Runes emphasizes streamlined token creation, improved usability, and scalability, offering a lucrative opportunity for early adopters ahead of Bitcoin's halving event.
Below is everything you need to get started and explore further as needed.
Official documentation | Specification
Our insights
Runes are to be released at block 840,000. You can easily check the status of the Bitcoin blockchain on mempool.space.
Xverse is a good wallet to get started with ordinals and runes.
Connect to MagicEden and explore ordinals collections. Runes will have their own category there very soon.
Running a node is likely the most reliable way to deploy, mint, and transfer runes around early on. There are many guides out there but essentially, it requires fully synchronizing a bitcoin client first, and then indexing satoshis via the official ord client.
There is currently significant attention to the anticipated release of runes within the ordinals sphere. The best return on investments are made when attention on an innovative technology is low. Thus in the case of runes and at this time, it is okay to wait and let the hype settle down. Following closely however, and accumulating accordingly can potentially be rewarding.
There is no official rune out yet. What is tradable today on the marketplaces are placeholders (inscriptions) only used to distribute runes in the future while being held (similar to points). Some call them rune miners, but there is still a lot of uncertainty around these (likely limited functional lifespan, volatile allocations, and relative tickers not guaranteed).
Community X threads
Casey’s insights (developer of ordinals & runes)
Terminology explained (by BobBodily)
Runes projects (by NFTBrad)
X. Community. Notes. NFA Disclaimers apply