Collect Three or More Ordinals? You Have an Airdrop Coming
With Runestone, a project from historical NFTs advocate Leonidas, the airdrop meta is coming to Bitcoin Ordinals.
Its goal is to drop a single Runestone–a Bitcoin Ordinal–to any Bitcoin address holding three or more non-text (or JSON script) Ordinals on or before block height 826,600—one year after the Ordinals protocol was released.
At block height 840,000, the Runestone protocol will go live, and thousands of Bitcoin Ordinal wallets will receive their Runestone. Although Leonidas promises this Ordinal inscription will have no utility and serves as a memento of the first year of Ordinals’ existence, interest in the airdrop is high.
“Volunteer contributors in the Discord determined that there are ~110,000 addresses that held three or more non-TXT/JSON inscriptions at block height 826,600 (6 days ago on the 1-year anniversary of Ordinals).
Using parent-child, batch inscribing, and delegation, a Runestone could be inscribed and airdropped to all ~110,000 addresses for ~2.3 BTC at 30 sat/vB. At current BTC/USD prices, that would be $96,724 total, with a cost of $0.88 per recipient.
This would be the largest Ordinals airdrop ever, and the vast majority of year-one Ordinals collectors would receive it regardless of whether they were a whale or a minnow. Given each Runestone would likely have value far exceeding the 88 cents in fees it would take to execute it, it would be irrational for the year one Ordinals community not to reward themselves with it,” Leonidas posted on Jan. 27.
Instead of a well-bankrolled plan aimed at making a profit, Runestone is built as a volunteer-led project, so Leonidas is asking folks to step up: he’s looking for engineers to help with the inscribing of the Runestones and a mining pool to donate the 4MB Bitcoin block that will be needed to put them all on-chain.
“Runestone is a 100% volunteer, decentralized initiative to reward the year one Ordinals community, but it will not happen without help,” he posted on Feb. 1 on X.
The team is also looking for a volunteer to donate a rare sat—a fragment of Bitcoin mined on a particular historical date or at the beginning or end of a Bitcoin milestone like a rise in mining difficulty level.
In keeping with the volunteer nature of the project, a couple of community initiatives have sprung up to help Ordinals enjoyoooors check whether their wallets are eligible to receive a Runestone.
You can check your Ordinals addresses via the links on this post. It’s important to note that there are plenty of edge cases—if you think your address qualifies but it’s not listed in one of the checkers, get in touch with the Runestone team via their forum-based Discord.
The block at which the Runestones will be issued is also the point at which Bitcoin’s next halving takes place—sometime in the next few months in 2024.
It’s important to note that the airdrop is per address—so many people who engaged with Ordinals early on using tools like Sparrow Wallet, where each Ordinal had to have its own address, may not be eligible to receive a Runestone.
While the Runestone artwork has been chosen, the imagery and artist are still a secret. The placeholder artwork? It looks a lot like a Bitcoin Rock.