Sparking the latest mystery surrounding Bitcoin Ordinals, someone dropped 21,000 digital coins as part of an apparent promotion for the game on Sunday.
“The technology arms race has begun – 21,000 cutting-edge RSICs, manufactured in our factory, are being sent from our distribution centers to the Ordinals community,” says a message written in inscription 56,754,110. “RSICs are designed for the sole purpose of securing a bag of runes. These runes will be etched in our foundry after the Runes Protocol is launched on Bitcoin.”
While the group behind the airdrop calls itself Runecoin, it appears unrelated to the concept of Runes that Ordinals’ original developer, Casey Rodarmor, conceived last year.
Runecoin rules outline the backstory: All 21,000 RSIC coins were initially manufactured but can no longer be produced due to a “mysterious explosion of the factory and distribution centers.” These RSICs are airdropped to the Ordinals community, giving RSIC holders three options: mine the runes, sell the RSICs on the market, or let their RSICs vanish. Runecoin said 10% of RSICs are allocated to game designers.
What adds even more mystery to the game is that the original inscription just reads “Publish more inscriptions”.
Last week, a message on the Bitcoin blockchain contained a riddle that caused quite a stir in the Ordinals community.
The message in the inscription of Arrangements No. 55,365,041 reads: “10,000 seats, side by side.” “One UTXO, untouched inside. Born together, cursed at heart. Built with code, Bitcoin Art.” The mysterious message was followed by a series of numbers: 391481082118 – 391481092117.
The engraving “game” has generated excitement from some Ordinals faithful, with more than 33 bitcoins, with a trading volume of about $1 million so far, according to Magic Eden. However, others have questioned the airdrop claims and how they were announced on social media.
“While the RSIC approach is new and unique, there is absolutely no guarantee that this will be the first RON ever, and this team has no idea what the final protocol will look like,” said cryptocurrency podcast host and director Emblem Vault producer Jake Gallen wrote. “Unless this is actually @rodarmor behind it.”
As a core shareholder of the BRC-20 Omnisat platform, Gallen – like many others – can only speculate about who is behind Runecoin, saying that calling airdropped inscriptions “runes” distorts the reality of what a potential buyer is getting.
“This can cause a lot of harm to new buyers who don’t know what they’re getting into when they buy an engraving,” Gallen said. Decryption In an interview. “They think it’s runes, even though (the rune protocol) won’t last for another three months.”
While Gallen’s previous statements on social media have been called “FUD,” he emphasized the importance of transparency and providing all available public information to make informed decisions. He expressed concern about users engaging in activities without full knowledge, and called for combating such ill-conceived actions.
“You can call this FUD or whatever you want, but the truth is the marketing behind this is not true,” Gallen continued. “This entire post can of course be refuted, but if you are going to play this game, please (do your own research) DYOR and make sure you understand the entirety of what is being presented before copying your own statements.”
“The way the RSIC airdrop was done by @rune_coin is really cool, I hope the Ordinals community airdrop becomes a trend, but this kind of marketing needs to be ruled out,” NFT historian and Ordinals collector Leonidas tweeted.
Calling it a red flag, Leonidas warned that Ordinal fans should wait until the Rune Protocol is released before diving into a project using that name.
“It’s obviously not the first rune on Bitcoin, and Casey has stated multiple times that no rune is a rune until the protocol actually drops and the first rune token on the chain is actually minted,” Leonidas said. “I absolutely hate that RSIC markets itself this way and I especially hate that it will mostly mislead ‘ordinary’ people in the Ordinals community who don’t take the time to understand why a claim like this is so blatantly false.”
Adding to the confusion in the airdrop, the Runecoin Twitter account said that the rune protocol had not yet been released, and no runes had been etched.
“We think this is a fun distribution mechanism, which can be used for many things, including runes, and we wanted to try it out and have fun with it. We hope you do too,” the Runecoin account said.
Edited by Ryan Ozawa.