Runestone, a Bitcoin Ordinals project led by pseudonymous NFT historian and Ordinals collector Leonidas, is preparing to launch its first airdrop.
The Runestone project is making waves due to its origins – Leonidas says it’s a pre-Runes project that will illustrate Casey Rodarmor’s vision for fungible tokens on Bitcoin – but also the potential financial windfall that Runestone holders could potentially see as soon as the full Runes are available. The protocol will come online after Bitcoin’s halving later this year.
Runestone Ordinal inscriptions are trading higher on exchanges such as Whales Market in anticipation of the event. Despite the limited number of Runestone inscriptions, the current minimum pre-market price for one copy on the Solana-based decentralized over-the-counter Whales Market website is $545.
“It’s a decentralized, 100% volunteer effort – I tweeted the idea last month to do a huge airdrop to reward the first year’s Ordinals community,” Leonidas shared Declutter. “There is no team assignment, no entity behind it, no utility and no roadmap.
“More than ten different companies in the Ordinals ecosystem have donated money, technical resources, etc. to help make this happen,” he added.
The Ethereum ecosystem dumped $25 billion on itself in the last cycle.
Now it’s Bitcoin’s turn.
The regular airdrop season has arrived.
— Leonidas (@LeonidasNFT) February 20, 2024
To see if an address is eligible for the airdrop, users must copy their Bitcoin address into the Runestone airdrop interface.
“A valid address for the Runestone airdrop must have inscriptions on Block 826,600,” according to the Runestone page on the OKx exchange website.
The provisions of the Runestone airdrop include containing at least three inscriptions, excluding inscriptions with file types beginning with ‘text/plain’ or ‘application/json’.
Leonidas said the logic for Runestone is simple.
“The main use case for blockchains today – and not forever – is ‘number go up.’ The most honest form of ‘number going up’ is meme coins that serve no purpose,” Leonidas tweeted on Thursday. “The best blockchain in the world should have the best meme coin in the world. The best meme coin in the world should be distributed via a massive free airdrop with no team allocation to the most established community.
112,383 addresses have qualified for the Runestone airdrop. According to Leonidas, each address receives one Runestone.
Eligible inscriptions also include so-called cursed inscriptions indexed by Ord. Cursed Ordinals, also known as Cursed Inscriptions, refer to Ordinals that the Ord indexer originally overlooked, preventing them from appearing in wallets and marketplaces. Cursed ordinal numbers receive a negative number until resolved.
According to NFT marketplace Magic Eden, there are currently more than 74,000 cursed inscriptions.
“The original version of the Ordinals indexer didn’t catch them; the newer versions do,” Leonidas said earlier Declutter. “The problem is that when you include the inscription numbers in new versions, the old inscription numbers are rearranged,” he said, explaining that swearing or giving the inscription a negative number was the solution.
The name Runestone is intended to position the project firmly within the long-awaited Runes interchangeable token standard from Rodarmor, the original creator of the Ordinals protocol. Leonidas confirmed that Runestone is part of the Runes ecosystem, but is not yet a Runes token.
“The Runes ecosystem is currently Casey’s core protocol, plus companies building explorers, DEXs, [and] wallets to support this, plus pre-Runes projects that plan to release Runes tokens when the protocol is released,” Leonidas explains. “Runestone is a pre-Runes project where the Runestone inscription people receive in the airdrop will be converted into a Rune token on Casey’s Rune Protocol when it releases in 8 weeks.”
As Leonidas previously clarified: “There are no more Runes until the protocol actually disappears and a first Runic token is actually minted onto the chain.”
He was responding to the group behind the unrelated Runecoin project, which delivered 21,000 RSIC inscriptions to the Ordinals community in January.
“The way the RSIC airdrop of @rune_coin was done is very neat, and I hope airdropping to the Ordinals community becomes a trend, but this kind of marketing needs to be called out,” Leonidas tweeted at the time. “It’s clearly not the first Rune on Bitcoin… no project should make this claim until the Runes Protocol is released and there is actually a first rune token on Bitcoin.”