Airdrops Arrive On Bitcoin With Ordinals Project Runestones – The Defiant

Crypto airdrops have been in the spotlight over the past months, so it was only a matter of time before they reached Bitcoin.

Runestones, a Bitcoin Ordinals project led by pseudonymous Ordinals collector and self-proclaimed NFT historian LeonidasNFT, will distribute over 112,000 runestones to wallets that hold three inscriptions or more from any of the more than 2,300 collections that exist across the Ordinals space.

Ahead of the event, Runestone Ordinal inscriptions are trading on Solana-based OTC exchange, WhalesMarket. The lowest price is $665, meanwhile the ceiling sits at $1,995.

Like NFTs

Ordinals Inscriptions are the equivalent of Ethereum NFTs. They allow for non-financial data to be inscribed on the Bitcoin blockchain, from JPEGS to text to videos. Inscriptions get linked to an individual satoshi–the smallest denomination of a bitcoin.

The “fairdrop,” as it was dubbed, comes in anticipation of Ordinal’s creator, Casey Rodarmor’s new protocol, Runes. Runes, which was announced in September and is set to launch in eight weeks, offers a UTXO-based alternative to the BRC-20 token standard–given the latter’s energy inefficiency.

UTXOs, or unspent transaction output, is the “change” a bitcoin transaction leaves after sending funds to a different wallet. Rodarmor’s Runes protocol aims to leverage this system by assigning tokens to a specific UTXO, allowing for a simple and efficient way to inscribe arbitrary data (Inscriptions) onto Bitcoin.

Each Runestone will transform into a Runes token when the protocol goes live.

Simple Logic

The logic for Runestones “is simple,” wrote Leonidas on Twitter on Feb. 23.

“The primary use case for blockchains today (not forever) is number go up,” Leonidas NFT said, adding that the most honest form of number go up is non-utility meme coins.

According to Leonidas, the top blockchain in the world should have the top meme coin in the world, and “the top meme coin in the world should be distributed via a massive free airdrop with no team allocation to the most based community.”

Rodarmor’s Web3 vision

The airdrop is highly hyped in the Ordinals community not only because of the potential “free money,” but also because it is one step closer to Rodarmor’s Web3 vision for Bitcoin.

Leonidas explained that the Ordinals creator sees BTC as the base currency, with Runes fulfilling the role of fungible tokens, Rare Sats are semi-fungible tokens, and Inscriptions close the loop as NFTs. Rare sats are a fraction of a bitcoin that was mined on a historical date, or in a block that has value to a specific person. An example is the first sat mined in the first halving block.

Eligible addresses of the Runestone airdrop include holding at least three inscriptions, although it excludes those with file types that begin with “text/plain” or “application/json.” Qualifying addresses must also hold Inscriptions starting from block 826,600.

Cursed inscriptions are also considered eligible for airdrops. These refer to Ordinals that the Ord indexer, a software that allows for tracking and registering Inscriptions, originally overlooked, causing them to not show in wallets and marketplaces.

Runestone has been labeled “a process” by its creator, Leonidas, who wrote on the community Discord today that “If we wanted to do something basic it would have happened a month ago and everyone could have floored to make a little money and life would move on.”