There are many assets and they are in chaos. The Runes ecosystem is in the Cambrian period.

In the week before the halving, the overall market of the currency circle was not very good, but the Bitcoin ecosystem has become hot since entering April, and Gas has risen, showing a trend of rising the third wave of Bitcoin. In particular, during the launch of the Runes protocol on the mainnet, the community was enthusiastic and actively prepared for the minting of sub-wallets, UTXO splitting, and testing the entire minting process, hoping to seize the opportunity.

However, in conjunction with the launch of the Runes mainnet after the Bitcoin halving, project parties rushed to grab the first few runes, causing the Gas price to soar to an incredible height. With such a high casting cost, most people chose to wait and see, while the prices of the rune concept NFTs that had previously rushed ahead, such as Runestone and RSIC, have been falling all the way. "I don't know what to buy, I don't know what to play", has become the voice of these well-prepared community members, and the market seems a little confused.

“We are in a relatively chaotic and confused period, and no broad consensus has been formed yet.” BTC ecosystem observer and player 0xSea said this in an interview with BlockBeats, which truly reflects the current status of the Runes ecosystem.

Expectations are full but controversial

Looking back at the previous coin issuance protocols in the Bitcoin ecosystem, from Brc20's ORDI to Arc20's ATOM, the popularity and liquidity of the entire protocol are driven by the protocol's first asset. "First is First" has always been the slogan of the Bitcoin ecosystem, so the leader is generally the first coin deployed by the protocol. However, on Runes, this investment theorem was temporarily invalidated.

Casey hard-coded his own rune number 0, "UNCOMMON•GOODS", in the Runes protocol, which was written directly into the code. Starting from Bitcoin block height 840,000, this "Genesis Rune" can be minted in unlimited quantities, one per transaction, and its minting window will last for four years until the next Bitcoin halving. During these four years, although the number of "UNCOMMON•GOODS" has continued to increase, its market value has declined due to dilution, and the Genesis Rune and the Runes protocol are deeply bound together.

"From this mechanism, it can be seen that Casey hopes that the Genesis Rune and the Runes protocol will be a game that can be played for at least four years." 0xSea told BlockBeats.

Extremely long characters, no recognition

Old meme players pay great attention to recognition, but the length of the current runes reduces the recognition of memes.

In Casey's Runes design, the length of the rune name is set to a maximum of 26 characters, which actually reduces the recognition of the meme. It is worth noting that although Casey's hard-coded "UNCOMMON•GOODS" is not subject to this rule, the separator "•" is not counted in the total number of characters. This is to improve the recognition of the ticker, such as "WO•YAO•DISS•YOU".

Current Runes Asset Name

In short, after the "Runes" are officially activated at block height 840,000, all 13-26 character tickers can be deployed immediately, but "ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ" is the first 12 character ticker that can be deployed. These 12 character tickers will be gradually unlocked between blocks 840,000 and 857,500, that is, every 17,500 blocks, a shorter 1 character ticker will be unlocked.

The next halving is expected in February 2028, when the block height will reach 1,050,000. During the next halving, there will be a total of 210,000 blocks, which will be divided into about 12 update cycles, each containing about 17,500 blocks, which will be completed about every three to four months. Therefore, from now until the next halving, the number of characters in the ticker will be reduced by one for every 17,500 blocks until it is reduced to one character.

Therefore, for old players who are used to four characters, such as $PEPE, they need to wait about three years to see the unlocking of such short tickers.

Related reading: "Runes are coming, and a war of Ordinals is about to begin? "

Sea believes that Casey designed this gradually decreasing ticker rule to allow the Runes protocol to continue to attract the attention of the industry and the community as the number of characters slowly decreases, thereby maintaining intermittent but lasting interest in Runes. “By 2027, when the ticker is reduced to the minimum digit, we expect to see a peak in attention.”

Old players find Runes boring

“Old players of BRC20 will find Runes boring without any innovation in the gameplay itself,” Sea told BlockBeats. “Whether it’s Fair Launch, airdrops, grabbing BRC20, or mining ARC20 based on hash POW, everyone has played it once, and Runes doesn’t bring much freshness. In the absence of novelty, unless there is a clear wealth effect to be foreseen, players’ interest may quickly fade and become weak.”

Although Runes has made some technical improvements—such as simplifying the two transactions originally required for BRC20 into one, thereby lowering the threshold and cost for players—this improvement has already been achieved in ARC20.

After comparing various protocols in the Bitcoin ecosystem, KOL scientist Box also believes that Runes has no major breakthroughs in technology.

Bai Cai, an early OTC trader and market maker of Ordinals, bluntly pointed out: "Casey borrowed the idea of the Atomicals protocol from the beginning to the end without mentioning it at all."

On the emotional level, Sea agrees with Bai Cai's view that the so-called innovation of Runes is actually very limited. It is mainly relying on Casey's personal influence and catering to the mood of the Western community to reap the victory of BRC-20 and Atomicals.

Sea believes that BRC-20 represents innovation from 0 to 1, although it is a bit rough; Runes is the culmination of the optimization faction, mainly meeting the needs of the Western community for BRC-20, but it does not bring paradigm innovation. In contrast, Atomicals represents a true paradigm innovation, not just a minor optimization. After all, when Arthur started writing Atomicals in February last year, BRC-20 had not yet been released.

Although Sea pointed out that the innovation of the Runes protocol is limited,he also believes that a protocol does not necessarily need innovative breakthroughs to become a "standard",the market's choice is the decisive factor. "In fact, just like Tencent in the Internet industry, many of the products it has made in the past decade are not original (including WeChat), but are optimization + micro-innovation."

What hype logic will Runes have?

Although the Runes protocol, which has been expected to be raised, has been controversial in terms of the degree of innovation and protocol gameplay. But for most users who come to the cryptocurrency circle, profit is the first priority. They don’t care how much innovation Runes has, but they care more about which Runes protocol targets are suitable for speculation.

Besides, there is more room for profit when there are differences. Although many leading Runes projects have not yet airdropped, with the recent reduction in gas fees, most project parties’ airdrops are already on the way. In addition to the old-fashioned Runestone and RSIC, what other hype logic will the Runes protocol have?

Runes may become the new favorite of swing traders

After the snapshot was completed in block 840,269, each user holding Runestone NFT received 889,806 DOG•GO•TO•THE•MOON (Rune No. 3). After the snapshot was completed, the floor price of Runestone fell sharply to 0.032 BTC, a drop of 59.5% in 24 hours. As of writing, the floor price of Runestone has further dropped to 0.029 BTC.

While the price of Runestone continues to fall, its airdropped Runes meme coin DOG has been on an upward trend since its airdrop on April 24. According to Magic Eden data, the current unit price of DOG•GO•TO•THE•MOON is 7.79 sats, and the 24-hour trading volume is as high as 111 BTC, which is far superior to other Runes assets and temporarily ranks first in Runes.

At the same time, the total market value of DOG•GO•TO•THE•MOON has reached 500 million US dollars, and the current market value of Runestone plus DOG is close to the historical high of Runestone.

After the airdrop, Runestone seems to be an empty shell after being de-shelled, and part of its consensus liquidity has been transferred to DOG. Such a change raises a question: Does this "shell" still have value?

Sea commented: "The Runestone team has already considered this issue, so the founder Leonidas has always emphasized that 3 tokens will be issued, and DOG is just one of them."The price has now fallen below $0.02 and may even fall below $0.01, as it does not seem to have much practical use in the short term. However, the situation may change in the coming months. If the project announces the details of the airdrop of the second token in October, this may re-attract the market's attention and drive prices up.

In this way, Runestone may be one of the assets in the Runes ecosystem that is extremely suitable for swing trading. Of course, this still puts holders on a certain test in terms of information acquisition and processing methods.

On the other hand, RSIC's smaller price drop after the airdrop can be attributed to its stronger mining machine attributes. Unlike Runestone, RSIC takes snapshots based on the block time held. Even if sold, the previously held block time still belongs to the original holder. "Even though the second season details of RSIC have not yet been announced, it is very likely that the blocks currently held are already being counted," Sea told BlockBeats.

Degen meme culture in Bitcoin

To put it bluntly, the tokens on the Runes protocol are still memes. Therefore, in addition to Runes frontrunners such as Runestone and RSIC, there are many meme coins with Bitcoin native elements that are released in a completely fair manner, heralding huge alpha opportunities.

Fairness is one of the core values of meme. If a meme reserves too much for itself, the community will generally not support it. A true "fair launch" means that no funds are reserved for founders or early investors, ensuring that all participants have equal opportunities.

In addition, recognition is also a key factor in the success of a meme. For example, the puppets and wizards, which were previously highly recognizable on BRC-20, had a significant increase in market value before Runes went online. The runes they are now deploying and airdropping are rune No. 13 PUPS•WORLD•PEACE and rune No. 17 MAGIC•INTERNET•MONEY. Another example is BITCOIN•PEPE•MATRIX. Sea particularly appreciates the Pepe element in Runes, which is a rune released by an overseas Pepe OG community. He mentioned that "the image of Pepe, from early comics to various emoticons widely circulated in the Internet community, has a strong communication power and has reached millions or even tens of millions of audiences."

"And The ticker is elsa. This is the only project I played on the first day of Runes' launch." Sea said. Elsa is the name of the dog of Bitcoin OG Hal Finney. Hal Finney was the first trader on the Bitcoin network and went down in history because of the 10 BTC transferred to him by Satoshi Nakamoto. Hal Finney died of health problems in 2014, but his status in the community cannot be ignored, adding a deep historical significance to the relevant meme. After all, this is in the Bitcoin ecosystem. If you have Bitcoin elements, you will naturally be more popular.

Hal Finney and his dog, source network

In addition, the epic Bitcoin NFT project Blob, which won the fourth Bitcoin halving block from ViaBTC with 33.3 BTC, is also worth paying attention to. Its elements such as laser eyes, rare satoshis, and halving all represent the pure elements of Bitcoin.

Related reading: 《Interpretation of the recent explosion of Blob Army: BTC NFT full of artistic attributes》

According to Magic Eden data, Blob's floor price rose by more than 55% in 24 hours, reaching 0.0543 BTC.

Recently, @Elocremarc, the co-founder of the Bitcoin NFT project Blob and the sixth-ranked contributor to the Ordinals protocol, is currently developing "recursive runes", and it is expected that Blob will also take action in the rune ecosystem in the future.

In the communication with BlockBeats, Sea also expressed its expectations for Blob in the Runes ecosystem: "If Blob issues coins in the future and operates well, I think it will be an excellent meme. After all, the current Runes meme is still a little bit off. But this is just my guess. I guess the probability of Blob issuing coins may be 30%."

Will Runes also have a product narrative?

In the early days, most people's impression of the Bitcoin ecosystem was all memes, but after a year of development, the market has more things, including Bitcoin Layer 2 and lending.

Runes will be the same. At first, it seemed to be only related to memes, but as time goes by, especially in terms of a year, it is definitely not just a meme. BlockBeats also observed that there are already Bitcoin lending protocols preheating on Runes.

A prominent example is Shell Finance, a trustless lending protocol built on Bitcoin Layer1. With the help of PSBT and DLC technology, Shell Finance implements a lending and liquidation process in a trustless environment. This protocol consists of two core modules: one is the synthetic stablecoin asset $BTCx, which is anchored to the value of $BTC and issued; the other is a lending protocol that supports the use of a variety of inscription assets (including Ordinals, Runes, Atomicals, Stamp, etc.) as collateral to lend $BTCx.

Currently, Shell Finance is issuing its own NFT, the Darkman whitelist, in various NFT asset communities of Bitcoin, and Darkman holders will also have the opportunity to receive Runes token airdrops issued by Shell Finance in the future.

In a conversation with BlockBeats, Shell Finance revealed that they would use the token launch on the Runes protocol to complete the construction of the community core and the cold start of the product and liquidity.

"Our approach is this: we first choose to conduct functional testing (FT) because we are a lending project that focuses on actual landing. For lending projects, we mainly need two things: first, qualified users; second, necessary liquidity. In order to let potential users know about us, we did not carry out large-scale promotion in Q2, but adopted a productized mechanism by taking asset snapshots for specific asset holders. Therefore, users who hold our FT are actually active users of these assets and are also the target users we will target in the future." Shell Finance explained their market strategy and product positioning.

When Shell Finance's main product (MP) was launched, they had actually built the core of the community. This strategy is not only to build a solid user base, but also to ensure the sustainability of product development and long-term market participation.

In addition to the three types of hype logic of the Runes protocol mentioned above (band runes, Bitcoin degen memes, and long-term product narratives), there are also some consensus opportunities in the market, including what 0xWizard said, "ordinals OG-issued projects; well-known projects from ETH or other chains, such as Prometheus; projects that can introduce Solana liquidity in the future." These will not be elaborated one by one.

At present, after Runestone's airdrop, whether in terms of liquidity or floor price, Runestone and its airdropped DOG•GO•TO•THE•MOON are still temporarily in the "Dragon One", but in the long run, there is a possibility of being "overtaken on the curve". BlockBeats will also continue to track the subsequent development of the Runes protocol.

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