Metaversal

Taking the Pulse of Ordinals and Runes on Bitcoin

With Bitcoin bigger than it's ever been, is a new era starting for its cultural assets like Ordinals and Runes?

Dec 5, 2024 • 4 min read

🟠 BTC just reached $100k for the first time ever, a major milestone poised to draw big attention and new users—what's this mean for Bitcoin's top culture assets?

Context:

Newcomers today will discover a Bitcoin ecosystem more dynamic than it was in the big 2017 and 2021 crypto bull runs, thanks to newer innovations like Ordinals and Runes.

Refresher:

In January 2023, Casey Rodarmor released Ordinals, a protocol for converting individual satoshis—the smallest Bitcoin denomination—into non-fungible digital artifacts.
In April 2024, Rodarmor followed up with Runes, a protocol for deploying fungible tokens on Bitcoin.
While Bitcoin has enjoyed various experimental tokenization standards throughout the years, the arrival of Ordinals and Runes popularized NFTs and memecoins respectively in the Bitcoin community to an extent we haven't seen before.

The Pulse of Ordinals:

The Ordinals ecosystem activity last peaked in April 2024 when hype around the launch of Runes was fully revved up.
Things here bottomed out through August before uptrending ahead of the 2024 U.S. presidential election. That uptrending has continued over the past month as optimism around Bitcoin's prospects in the mainstream have surged.
The largest Ordinals collection today is Bitcoin Puppets (~$165M market cap), which recently flipped NodeMonkes (~$138M market cap) in size for this honor. I'm not surprised, as the Puppets have a charming, active creator and a very active community in crypto's top social spheres.

Currently, the Puppets are the only non-Ethereum NFTs in the top 10 NFTs by market cap, coming in at 10th place.
However, the 5 largest Bitcoin NFT collections are all within the top 20—a strong showing compared to Solana, which presently hosts only one project (Mad Lads) in the top 20 despite having a significant head start (and UX advantages) over Ordinals.

People aren't just trading the floors here, either. As you can see in the NFT Price Floor "Top Sales" tracker below, there have been individual Ordinals sales as high as $140k over the past month, indicating interest from whale collectors.

And where's all this Ordinals trading happening? Mostly on multichain NFT marketplace Magic Eden.
As you can see per the large magenta bars in NFT Pulse's "Marketplaces" 30-day stats below, the vast majority of NFTers on Bitcoin are using Magic Eden as their go-to exchange. It seems likely we'll see more platforms (perhaps OpenSea 2.0?) compete for Ordinals trading over the next year, but for now Magic Eden is decidedly the king of the hill here.

The Pulse of Runes

While Runes didn't explode onto the Bitcoin scene in April 2024 to the extent that many anticipated they would, they've quickly become a popular and simpler alternative to BRC-20s, a clunkier Ordinals-based fungible token standard that arrived in early 2023.
For comparison, the combined market cap of all BRC-20s is presently ~$1.87B, while the total market cap of all Runes is ~$1.13B.
Notably, the top Rune token at the moment, DOG-GO-TO-THE-MOON, has a bigger market cap (~$700M) than every single BRC-20 token with the exception of the largest one, ORDI (~$1B).

What to Watch Going Forward?

I think there's a strong chance that the historic influx of attention around Bitcoin happening right now will spill over and lead to activity surges around Ordinals and Runes projects through 2025.

More people will start looking for things to do with their BTC, and these cultural assets are low-hanging fruit here. But what are some bigger picture things to keep an eye on in this corner of the cryptoeconomy?

That said, here are three fronts of note that will be worth tracking closely, in my opinion:

OP_CAT — The reactivation of this opcode will lead to true Bitcoin Layer 2s (L2s), which would not only decongest the main Bitcoin network but also lead to better UX and new sorts of app experiments around Ordinals and Runes. Watch for development progress here in 2025.
New inscription experiments — While Ordinals lack the runtime expressiveness of Ethereum smart contracts, certain innovations, like recursive inscriptions, do allow for dynamism and complexity around Bitcoin NFTs. Look for more projects to start using these innovations toward new experimental ends.
Magic Eden Wallet — I highlighted earlier how Magic Eden the platform is dominating the Ordinals trading scene currently. Can the project's Magic Eden Wallet offering, which supports Ordinals and Runes, become the go-to wallet for Bitcoin cultural assets in kind? This will be a thread to keep an eye on.

More on Bitcoin

Not financial or tax advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.

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