Bitcoin’s highly anticipated upgrade after the 4/20 Halving event faced a setback with the introduction of Casey Rodarmor’s Runes, a new protocol for fungible tokens. However, since its launch, the protocol has experienced a significant decline in user engagement and prices.
Rodarmor’s Runes were initially seen as a promising alternative to existing fungible token protocols like BRC-20s and STAMPs, as it aimed to reduce on-chain transactions. Rodarmor, known for his innovative application of ordinal theory to Bitcoin, unintentionally created a popular NFT protocol with his FIFO convention, allowing the tracking of imaginary satoshis across transactions.
In response to demands from the NFT trading community, Rodarmor developed Runes, acknowledging the dominance of scams and memes in the fungible token market. Despite the theoretical impossibility of tracking ownership via satoshis, Rodarmor proposed a method through his Ordinals theory.
However, despite high expectations, the initial results of Runes have been disappointing. The launch of the first Rune, “Fehu,” was met with fanfare but experienced an 85% crash in market capitalization within a month. Despite the founder’s significant control over the token supply, its market value plummeted.
Meanwhile, meme coins on non-Bitcoin protocols continue to maintain their popularity. Dogecoin, with a market capitalization of $23 billion, and Pepe, exceeding $3.6 billion, serve as examples. The future of Rodarmor’s Runes remains uncertain, and only time will reveal whether it can surpass these established meme coins in terms of value.