Bitcoin Ordinals Wallets Will Soon Be Showered With Runestones—Here’s What You Need to Know

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Runestone, a Bitcoin Ordinals project spearheaded by pseudonymous NFT historian and Ordinals collector Leonidas, is preparing to launch its first airdrop.

The Runestone project is garnering a lot of buzz because of its pedigree—Leonidas says it is a pre-Runes project that will exemplify Casey Rodamor’s vision for fungible tokens on Bitcoin—but also the potential financial windfall Runestone holders can potentially see once the full Runes protocol comes online after the Bitcoin halving later this year.

Runestone Ordinal inscriptions are trading higher on exchanges like Whales Market in anticipation of the event. Despite the limited number of Runestone inscriptions, the current pre-market floor price for one 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 massive airdrop to reward the year one Ordinals community,” Leonidas told Decrypt. “There is no team allocation, no entity behind it, no utility, and no roadmap.

“Over ten different companies in the Ordinals ecosystem have donated funds, engineering resources, etc., to help make it happen,” he added.

The Ethereum ecosystem airdropped 25 billion dollars to itself during the last cycle.

Now it’s Bitcoin’s turn.

Ordinal airdrop season has arrived.

— Leonidas (@LeonidasNFT) February 20, 2024

To see if an address qualifies for the airdrop, users must copy their Bitcoin address into the Runestone airdrop interface.

“A valid address for the Runestone airdrop should hold inscriptions at Block 826,600,” the Runestone page on the OKx exchange website explained.

Stipulations of the Runestone airdrop include holding at least three inscriptions, not including inscriptions with file types starting with either “text/plain” or “application/json.”

Leonidas said the logic for Runestone is simple.

“The primary use case for blockchains today—not forever—is ‘number go up.’ The most honest form of ‘number go up’ is non-utility meme coins,” Leonidas tweeted on Thursday. “The top blockchain in the world should have the top meme coin in the world. The top meme coin in the world should be distributed via a massive free airdrop with no team allocation to the most based community.”

112,383 addresses have qualified for the Runestone airdrop. According to Leonidas, each address will receive 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, causing them to not show in wallets and marketplaces. Cursed Ordinals receive a negative number until they are resolved.

According to NFT marketplace Magic Eden, there are currently over 74,000 cursed inscriptions.

“The original version of the Ordinals indexer did not catch them; the newer versions do,” Leonidas previously told Decrypt. “The issue is that because of inscription numbers, if you make it catch them in new versions, then it would reorder old inscription numbers,” he said, explaining that cursing or giving the inscription a negative number was the solution.

The name Runestone is intended to position the project solidly within the highly anticipated Runes fungible token standard from Rodamor, the original creator of the Ordinals protocol. Leonidas confirmed that Runestone is a part of the Runes ecosystem, but is not a Runes token—yet.

“The Runes ecosystem is currently Casey’s core protocol, plus companies building explorers, DEXs, [and] wallets to support it, plus pre-Runes projects that plan on releasing Runes tokens when the protocol is released,” Leonidas explained. “Runestone is a pre-Runes project where the Runestone inscription people receive in the airdrop will convert into a Rune token on Casey’s Rune protocol when it comes out in 8 weeks.”

As Leonidas previously clarified, “No Runes are Runes until the protocol actually drops and a first Runes token is actually minted to the chain.”

He was responding to the group behind the unrelated Runecoin project, where 21,000 RSIC inscriptions were delivered to the Ordinals community in January.

“The way the RSIC airdrop by @rune_coin was done is really neat, and I hope airdropping to the Ordinals community becomes a trend, but this type of marketing needs to be called out,” Leonidas tweeted at the time. “It obviously is not the first Rune on Bitcoin… no project should be making this claim until the Runes protocol is released and there is actually a first rune token on Bitcoin.”

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