Relay inscriptions become the new main line of the market? The real and fake Runes protocol has set off a wave of rune hype

By Nancy, PANews

The heat of the inscription has not subsided, and the wind of runes blows next door. Recently, while the BTC inscription project Rune Alpha has sparked controversy in the community due to the clarification of Ordinals founder Casey Rodarmor, the concept of runes on BTC and ETH has also begun to be hyped due to the fact that the inscription is deeply exploited, which not only caused a surge in gas fees, but also increased its over-the-counter price.

A few days ago, Casey Rodarmor posted on the legitimacy of Rune Alpha, saying, “None of this is related to me, and when the (official) Runes are released, they will not be retroactively identified.” "For a while, the Runes protocol has once again become the focus of market attention.

The drama of the real and fake Runes protocol starts in September this year. At that time, Casey Rodarmor proposed a new BTC-based fungible token protocol, Runes, also known as Runes Protocol, as a potential alternative to the BRC-20 token standard. Casey Rodarmor believes that FT protocols such as BRC-20, RGB, Counterparty, and Taproot have emerged in the market, and most of them are very complex and may not be able to bring a good experience to BTC users. While BRC-20 is very simple, it takes up BTC space by generating “garbage” unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs).

According to Casey Rodarmor, Runes is a simple, UTXO-based FT protocol that enables BTC users to have a good experience of using it, which may attract users from other solutions with a worse on-chain footprint, and turn the attention of developers and users to BTC, encouraging them to adopt the BTC itself. Although Casey Rodarmor said that he is not sure whether this idea will actually come to fruition, the Runes protocol has indeed attracted market attention, in addition to the launch of a bounty for the launch of the Rune protocol, as well as the issuance of $runes tokens.

After a lapse of a few months, the “Rune Alpha” mainnet was officially launched, and it also caused market FOMO due to its similarity to Runes’ name. Although Casey Rodarmor denied it, and Rune Alpha officially explained that it had nothing to do with it, the first token $COOK still attracted many users to mint, and the OTC price increased about tenfold at one point.

At the same time, runes such as $pipe, the first token based on the BTC UTXO token protocol Pipe, and $ers based on the ERC-1155 token protocol Ethrunes have also begun to be speculated. According to several community members, Rune Alpha is based on ord 0.11.1, and the version is located in the Ordinal repository, so $COOK will also generate “garbage”.COOK

In fact, in addition to the popularity of Casey Rodarmor behind this rune craze, “solving on-chain congestion” is also the main reason why runes have attracted much attention, and the Runes protocol is considered a replacement for BRC-20. In particular, recently BTC core developer Luke Dashjr claimed that the Bitcoin Core client vulnerability exploited by the inscription has been assigned the identifier CVE-2023-50428 and has been added to the U.S. National Vulnerability Database.

It can be said that the multiple verbal crises of the inscription have pushed the rune to the front of the encryption table.