Crypto Thoughts 04-19-24
We are all eagerly awaiting the bitcoin halving, which is set to happen next week. This is when bitcoin’s block reward is cut in half and the supply of the asset is decreased. With this event a new narrative has arrived and that is meme coins on bitcoin. We have all seen the hype surrounding meme coins on Solana and Base and now we can shift our attention to memes on bitcoin with the introduction of the Rune Protocol. We anticipate that this will kick off a meme coin cycle that exceeds the hype of previous meme cycles on the other chains.
So what are Runes and how do we get in early? Runes were created by developer, Casey Rodarmor. He is the creator of the Ordinal Theory as well. The Rune protocol is a fungible token protocol on Bitcoin. The protocol works on the Bitcoin network and allows for the creation of digital tokens or runes. You can think of runes like ERC-20 tokens but on bitcoin not ethereum.
The Rune Protocol is set to launch and go live on the halving day and with that launch you will be able to purchase runes on sites like OKX and CoinW. We are going to walk through how you can prepare yourself before launch to potentially set yourself up to get some runes. There is a market of “pre rune” inscriptions or ordinals that you can access at magiceden.io which should give you the opportunity to be airdropped runes.
In order to use the Magiceden site you will need the Xverse wallet. This is a bitcoin wallet available on mobile for ios and android and for chrome on desktop. You can think of this like the metamask wallet of bitcoin.
- Download the wallet by visiting xverse
- Create your new wallet
- Backup your 12 word seedphrase in a safe place that is not connected to the internet. Click here to learn more about safe crypto practices. You will create a password for the wallet and then you will see that you have successfully created a wallet. It will show as an extension if you have done this using chrome desktop option as I have.
Once the wallet is created you can do things like change the name of the wallet, add new accounts, connect a hardware wallet and send and receive bitcoin assets.
- You’ll need to purchase bitcoin from an exchange to send to your wallet or send bitcoin that you already hold to your xverse wallet.
- From here we can click the website icon to connect your wallet to magiceden or we can navigate to the site within our browser.
Once you are at magiceden.io you can click connect wallet. Then we can browse the list of “Pre-runes” for purchase. You can filter your list by chain, and select bitcoin and then we will see a list of the top ordinal collections. The top collections listed are going to be the early projects that have already gotten a lot of attention.
These are projects like runestone, rune pups and bitcoin puppets. As you can see these are not cheap.
Click to the Pre-runes tab to navigate to that list and here you will find ordinal inscriptions that are planning to do an airdrop of runes. If you hold these you have the potential to get an airdrop when the Rune protocol goes live on the halving day.
You can browse the list of collections that are planning to doing airdrops here:
https://www.okx.com/web3/marketplace/inscription/ordinals/nft
Another site worth checking out if you want to follow the potential of some of these assets is Runesmarketcap.
Ultimately, I think runes are going to be big. We are very early and like all early technology we don’t yet know how everyone will adapt and latch on to this new narrative. Judging by how ordinals gained popularity, I’m willing to place a bet.