Runes Rally as Traders Move Up the Risk Curve

Runes on Bitcoin are surging, recovering strongly from their summer lows.

The rally is led by popular runes such as PUPS, which is up 600% in the last 30 days to a market capitalization of $210 million, BILLION-DOLLAR-CAT, which is up 900% to $90 million, and DOG-GO-TO-THE-MOON, which is up 85% to $525 million.

The Runes protocol launched in April, and while in its infancy, most popular Runes are essentially memecoins, but on Bitcoin. Runes are keeping pace with memecoin markets on Solana and Ethereum, which have also rallied hard over the last few weeks.

The founder of Ord.io, known as Leonidas on social media, recently said, “Choosing to fud "memecoins on Bitcoin" over the summer instead of loading up will likely go down as one of the biggest Ls in all of crypto.”

According to Magic Eden, total Runes volume has doubled over the last week as anticipation builds for the platform's upcoming “swaps” feature. Swaps will enable users to exchange one Rune collection for a different collection, or even just Bitcoin, allowing for “better liquidity and the ability to quickly enter and exit positions.”

Currently, users can only buy Runes through low liquidity orderbooks and bids, and the pivot to swapping will make the user experience much more similar to trading tokens on other chains like Ethereum.

The new feature also comes as Magic Eden, the largest Ordinals and Runes platform, prepares for its official token launch.