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This week was supposed to be the moment that fungible tokens on Bitcoin rocketed to prominence. Although some fungible tokens like the billion-dollar ORDI have gained modest popularity using standards like BRC-20 and STAMPS’ SRC-20, a brand new protocol was supposed to supersede these expensive, slow, and target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">minted new Runes, paying all-time high Bitcoin transaction fees.
Runes promised to be a more professional, less expensive, faster, and more seamless protocol for launching altcoins on Bitcoin. Rodarmor coded Runes because, in his words, “Fungible tokens are 99.9% scams and memes. However, they don’t appear to be going away any time soon.”
In short, Rodarmor launched Runes to bring meme coins to Bitcoin.
Degen trading Bitcoin Runes meme coins
When the halving occurred late Friday night, many fans of Rodarmor were busy working instead of celebrating. Many speculators wanted to mint a Rune within the first block of Bitcoin’s halving, paying astronomical fees alongside other users bidding for inclusion in that historically important block.
All told, Bitcoin speculators paid $2.4 million dollars to miners to store less than 4MB of transaction data within Bitcoin’s 840,000th block.
Two days later, many Runes prices have already started cratering. Five of the top eight Runes listed on Unisat have declined over the past 24 hours along with 27 of the top 40 on OKX.
Read more: Ordinals founder Casey Rodarmor to launch Runes at Bitcoin halving
The Casey Rodarmor-friendly leader of multiple Runes and Ordinals collections
Leonidas is a popular educator, influencer, and host of Twitter Spaces about topics relating to Casey Rodarmor. Rodarmor often joins Leonidas’ live social audio rooms to discuss coding and trading tips related to Rodarmor’s altcoins-on-Bitcoin protocols: Ordinals and Runes.
Pre-launch tokens for Leonidas’ DOG GO TO THE MOON Rune have traded only a few hundred thousand dollars within the past 24 hours on an obscure marketplace, Whales Market. Despite this thin market, Leonidas has brazenly predicted a WIF-like, six-figure percentage increase for the price of DOG GO TO THE MOON. A skim of his X feed reveals an endless stream of hyper-bullish, albeit vague price forecasts.
Runes have unusually long ticker symbols by Rodarmor’s design. Not including spaces, all runes must have at least 13 characters. Shorter ticker symbol lengths will slowly unlock for the next four years.
Leonidas also calls this 14-character (plus spaces) DOG GO TO THE MOON Rune simply ‘DOG’ and wants centralized exchanges to list it using his unofficial, three-character nickname.
He launched DOG GO TO THE MOON in a style similar to how Richard Heart launched PulseChain and PulseX — via a so-called ‘donation.’ Leonidas posted a bitcoin wallet to X with vague innuendos about airdropping donors DOG tokens in the future while disclaiming any financial responsibility. He then conducted a snapshot — as did Richard Heart for PulseChain and PulseX donors — and talked about the impressive financial value of his upcoming DOG airdrop.
He even retweeted a specific DOG valuation: 0.056 BTC. Most donors expect a DOG airdrop from him imminently.
Unlike Richard Heart, no regulator has yet accused Leonidas of wrongdoing. To his credit, Leonidas used substantially all of the donations he received to pay for Bitcoin transaction fees to etch DOG GO TO THE MOON. Heart, in contrast, personally sold collateral backing the value of his proprietary tokens to purchase personal luxury goods.
Leonidas’ most popular Rune, RSIC GENESIS RUNE, has traded less than $5 million on Unisat during the last 24 hours.
Read more Richard Heart claims SEC lawsuit infringes his free speech
Where are Bitcoin Runes traded?
The second-most traded Rune, SATOSHI NAKAMOTO, has traded less than $3 million on Unisat. Both of these Runes have lost at least 10% of their value since yesterday.
Indeed, most Runes have dipped in price over the last 24 hours.
On April 20 and April 21, Unisat was the dominant exchange for secondary trading of Runes. Luminex, the Runes minting and etching platform, is not an exchange but links to Magic Eden’s Runes exchange. Unfortunately, Magic Eden has been plagued by glitches and slow performance. Whales Market tried launching a Runes-on-Solana marketplace for pre-sales and synthetic price exposure, but it hasn’t gained much traction.
Stepping in quickly, giant centralized exchanges quickly overtook these nascent Runes marketplaces.
SATOSHI NAKAMOTO gained a tether-denominated centralized exchange listing on Gate.io, which boosted that Rune’s trading volume by $23 million within one day. Gate.io is by far the most voluminous exchange for Runes secondary trading today with only a single Rune — SATOSHI NAKAMOTO — listed.
Centralized crypto exchange giant OKX has also listed over 40 Runes for trading. Nevertheless, Gate.io’s trading volume for SATOSHI NAKAMOTO alone dwarfs the combined trading volume for the 41 Runes listed on OKX.