gm readers, just a quick update today as Charlie and I are both travelling - I’m going to give you a quick write up on the current ordinals/brc20/runes landscape.
The BTC eco in general has had a great start to 2024, for the very first time there is something to do on the chain with the most idle capital other than transact Bitcoin, and by proxy these shiny new things get a provenance premium just for being associated with BTC. I don’t like the comparison to punks, but it does feel almost like we get a second shot at early Ethereum NFT’s just because they are housed on Bitcoin.
Back in early 2023 Casey Rodamor created Ordinal theory and Bitcoin NFT’s were born (don’t give me technicalities, they ARE Bitcoin NFT’s). It wasn’t long before Domo created the BRC20 standard in March of 23, again essentially the fungible token equivalent on Bitcoin. Enter runes; I’m not going to lie and tell you that I properly understand the inner workings, but it’s basically an improvement on top of BRC20 - but we’ll get to runes a bit later.
There are essentially two front runners in the Ordinals eco, Bitcoin puppets and Nodemonkes. Both had a massive run up in mid-Feb as attention flowed from a floundering Ethereum NFT eco to Bitcoin. Nodemonkes gained 500% in two weeks topping out around 0.9 BTC and Puppets a little less with a 350% run topping out around 0.27 BTC.
Since then both had a cool off period, but puppets have firmly taken the lead in terms of mindshare and price action.
If I had to describe the variance between the two styles, cultures and communities I would call Nodes a little more ‘pressed suit and tie’ to puppets pure cult autism, like miladies without the the negative associations.
As with any good collection, part of the foundation is having strong and vocal supporters, and with strong and vocal supporters comes a bit of friendly competition and contention between pack leaders on the timeline - re the fabled flippening. Despite monkes initial head start, as of the time of writing at 2:39pm on a plane just departed hong kong, puppets have just flipped monkes. I have no particular horse in this race as I have both the horses, because I think they’ll both be great horses in the long term, but objectively the puppet horse chart looks much better for now.
But the funny part is neither of them are even near the top of the volume leaderboard at the moment because attention is elsewhere - which brings me back to runes.
We must give credit to RSIC’s for bringing runes to the minds of the people and really getting this whole meta started. RSIC’s was a random airdrop to a number of different collections back in mid-Jan. Lucky receivers needed to self send it to their own address and their RSIC would begin ‘mining’ their rune allocation for when the time comes. Now that time is nigh and scheduled right on the halvening, and as a side affect many, many new collections have airdropped (pre) runes or created a BRC20 and promised runes post halvening. And as a side effect of that side effect, puppets and nodes have been the recipients of many thousands of dollars in rune related airdrops.
Rune pups, runestones, rsics, tiny vikings, rune nodes, runex, rune guardians etc and so on.
I think runes will do well long term pending UX improvements, if the ecosystem leaders can successfully emulate some form of decentralised swap rather than the current ‘buy and sell in set amounts’ on unisat and similar platforms.
But for now it does feel a little toppy leading into the halvening. Rune pups are the current pack leader and are up 1000% in the last 8 days and sitting around a 500m market cap.
Pac finance fumble
On a seperate note, Blast has been hit yet again as a rogue contractor at Pac finance changed the liquidation threshold for ezETH loans when they were only meant to change the LTV ratio - resulting in $24m worth of liquidations just two blocks later
Find the tx here
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