Everyone and their dog is launching a “pre-Rune” in anticipation of the official Runes launch on the Bitcoin halving. For the uninitiated, pre-Runes are either Inscriptions/Ordinals or another token such as BRC20 which is expected to be converted to a Runes token post-launch (it’s an IOU).
And these pre-Runes are trading like hotcakes
Ordinals trader FarmerJoe have identified over $310 million in trading volume for the 3 leading pre-Runes projects. This is about a third of the total Ordinals marketplace volume (~$1.2 billion) since the first pre-Runes launched in February.
According to the site RunesMarketCap.com, we can see that there is currently over $519 million in pre-Runes market capitalization. This is close to 10% of the entire NFT market cap of $6.2 billion.
Traders & influencers are taking notice, in particular the $PUPS token. Last Friday, memecoin whisperer Ansem bought the ticker on a livestream to 120k+ viewers and sent the price of $PUPS on Solana from $3 → $120. Because PUPS trades both as a BRC-20 and a token on Solana, this created a massive arbitrage opportunity to buy PUPS on Bitcoin and bridge to Solana (both PUPS on Solana & BRC-20 will be converted to PUPS Runes). We expect to see many more arbitrage scenarios like this as the ecosystem tooling is still rather primitive.
If that wasn’t speculative enough, we now have synthetic pre-Runes allocations marketplaces now providing price discovery. Whales Market allows users to convert their accumulated RSIC tokens to a contract on Solana, creating a sort of (and please try not to laugh) — a sort of “synthetic pre-Runes accumulated IOU marketplace.”
