It’s Raining Runestones As Bitcoin Ordinals Project Launches Airdrop

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The highly anticipated Runestones airdrop began yesterday, causing a flurry of excitement across the Ordinals ecosystem.

Runestones are being distributed in batches of 1,400, and as of this writing, the project has sent more than 90% of them to a total of 112,383 eligible wallets. According to Ordinals Wallet, there are 90,623 owners, with 102,201 already in users wallets.

Secondary markets on Magic Eden and Ordinals Wallet show the floor price sitting at 0.018 BTC (roughly $1,200).

“Remember that you earned your Runestone by showing up and participating in Ordinals when nobody else did,” said self-proclaimed NFT historian Leonidas yesterday. “This was the only way to get a Runestone, and there was no team allocation or pre-sale.”

The “fairdrop” comes in anticipation of Ordinal’s creator Casey Rodarmor’s new protocol, Runes, which was announced in September and 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.

According to Magic Eden, Runestone's market cap is roughly $125 million, with 24-hour trading volume of 170 BTC ($11.5 million).

Ordinal inscriptions can be thought of as equivalent to NFTs. They allow non-financial data, from JPEGS to text to videos, to be inscribed on the Bitcoin blockchain. Inscriptions are linked to an individual satoshi, the smallest denomination of Bitcoin.