The creators of a popular Bitcoin Ordinals project called Runestone on Wednesday sent the original “parent” inscription — which they valued at 8 BTC, worth about $525,000 — to a wallet reportedly belonging to mythical Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto.
The Runestone – ordinal inscription 63,026,232, the largest inscription mined to date at approximately 4 MB in size – was sent to the Satoshi wallet by project collaborator and pseudonymous NFT historian Leonidas. In a Twitter message, Leonidas feigned that the move was a mistake and that there was nothing he could do to get the Ordinals inscription back.
But ultimately, the post was a joke that resembled an apparently very real joke shared this week by the developer of a Solana meme coin called Slerf, after that developer legitimately burned large portions of the token allocation. As careful Crypto Twitter users noted, Leonidas was just mememing.
“Guys, I screwed up. I burned the Runestone parent inscription worth 8 BTC. The trade was already mined so I can’t undo it,” he wrote in a tweet that is very reminiscent of the real Slerf tweet. “There’s nothing I can do to fix this. I’m so damn sorry.”
Guys, I screwed up. I burned the Runestone parent inscription worth 8 BTC.
The transaction has already been mined, so I can’t undo it.
There’s nothing I can do to fix this.
I’m so damn sorry. pic.twitter.com/FsVCrNHUgh
— Leonidas (@LeonidasNFT) March 20, 2024
So why send a valuable Ordinals asset to the wallet of Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, who has never been identified and has not been heard from for over 13 years? Leonidas said the ultimate intention was to “burn” or effectively destroy the inscription by making it inaccessible, thus preventing any change to the collection.
“It is the mother inscription of the Runestone collection, so by burning it we have sealed the collection to the chain,” Leonidas said. “There can only be 112,384 Runestones now.”
A parent/child inscription refers to how the history of the Ordinal is established and traced, making a third generation inscription the ‘grandchild’ of the original Ordinal. In the case of the Runestone, now that it has been burned, no future or ‘child’ inscriptions can be made from or linked to it.
As Leonidas explained, the process of sending the Runestone to Satoshi’s wallet was done in collaboration with OrdinalsBot and Marathon Digital Holdings, who worked together to mint the Runestone inscription.
While the bulky Runestone itself required two Bitcoin blocks to create, OrdinalsBot co-founder Bruffstar said sending the inscription to Satoshi was no different than sending regular transactions.
“It’s just the way the Ordinals protocol works,” Bruffstar said. “These things are inscribed at the time of the transaction, with the Ordinals index analyzing the transactions as they happen. The thing I sent you is actually just the satoshi,” he said, referring to the smallest dominance of a Bitcoin . (Yes, it is named after the creator of Bitcoin.)
“It was always part of the design that we would ensure that the block would be moved to Satoshi’s wallet at the end of the process,” added Toby Lewis, Head of Strategy at OrdinalsBot.
Last week saw the highly anticipated Runestone airdrop, sending 112,383 inscriptions to eligible wallets as a reward for being early believers in the Ordinals movement and having inscriptions during the first year of the Protocol.
“Remember, you earned your Runestone by showing up and participating in Ordinals when no one else did,” Leonidas said. “This was the only way to get a Runestone, and there was no team assignment or pre-sale.”
After the airdrop, more than 83,000 wallets were provided with a Runestone inscription. The Runestone Collection has a current floor price of 0.0526 BTC, approximately $3,445, with a total trading volume to date of 882 BTC ($57.8 million) on Magic Eden’s Bitcoin marketplace.