We are officially in full blown Runes Mania and the new fungible token protocol hasn’t even launched yet.
Ordinal teams have begun aggressively issuing inscriptions to generate hype and form liquidity In anticipation of the launch of the Runes token standard on Bitcoin. These inscriptions are IOUs for Runes tokens to be issued when the standard launches at the Bitcoin Halving in April.
What are Runes? Casey Rodarmor, creator of Ordinals, came up with an idea for a new fungible token standard on Bitcoin on a flight from Singapore to the US. His blog drafting the token standard he calls “Runes” lays out a simple scheme that addresses some of the structural issues with the BRC-20 standard, as well as works with scaling to certain Bitcoin Layer 2s like Lightning.
After a ton of work over the past 6 months, he’s officially releasing Runes into the wild starting at block 840,000, on Bitcoin Halving in April.
What is a “Runes Airdrop”? As the token standard neared release, an unrelated team released 21,000 inscriptions called “RSIC” to catch on to the hype. RSIC inscriptions could be used for a farming game where holders of the RSIC inscriptions could accrue IOUs for a future airdrop from the RSIC team once the Runes standard in April.
This past week, ‘Ordfluencer’ Leonidas led a campaign for the “largest Bitcoin airdrop ever” to incredible initial success (we wrote about it last week).
Now, the market for Runes airdrops is exploding and the estimated total market cap for just the inscriptions themselves has surpassed $500 million in fully diluted market cap.
Marketplaces like MagicEden are hotbeds for trading these inscriptions, with over half of the volume on the platform going towards Runes inscriptions airdropped to Ordinals users.
It looks like Runes Mania is only just getting started. There only 1 month left until the halving and Casey is getting ready to test the final Runes implementation out any day now.
Be on the lookout for more Runes coverage from Blockspace in Bitcoin Season 2 here soon.
