Author: Jaleel Jiali Source: X, @0xJaleel_eth

RUNES wants to be the “Las Vegas” on the Bitcoin network, but BRC20 does not want to be the “Atlantic City”.

Speaking of several well-known casinos in the world, many people’s first reaction is “Las Vegas” or “Macao”, and “Atlantic City” located in southeastern New Jersey is the first gambling in the United States in history.The city has long been destroyed and forgotten, even though “Atlantic City” once made a net profit of $3 billion a year.

Source: Internet

At the Ordinals Asia event in Hong Kong’s Bitcoin Conference Week two weeks ago, Casey Rodarmor, founder of the Ordinals and RUNES agreement, said directly and frankly in his speech: “If Ordinals and Runes are more transparent and more transparent than Las VegasAll Degens can be happy here, and I think this is also very good.”

The RUNES ecosystem has been online for more than a month. Its current market value has not only reached Casey’s initial target of one billion US dollars, but in recent days, ecological assets have also ushered in a new round of general growth across the board.

On May 29, DOG•GO•TO•THE•MOON’s 24-hour increase reached 38.83%, a record high; RSIC•GENESIS•RUNE’s 24-hour increase of 14.15%; PUPS•WORLD•PEACE’s 24-hour increase of 31%; CATS•IN•THE•SATS’ 24-hour increase reached 56%.

Yesterday’s RUNES ecological increase, data source: Geniidata

Casey honestly admits that the RUNES he built is a casino and hopes that users can get the best experience here.”For each of us, it is honest and practical to look at Ordinals, inscriptions and runes from a perspective that creates social, gambling and entertainment products. We don’t need to hide anything and give your user experienceGo to the fairest and most interesting product. ”

While RUNES is rising across the board, many community friends also remembered the first MEME casino in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Is BRC20 falling like “Atlantic City”?

How threat does RUNES pose to BRC20?

Before Runes were officially launched, many community friends seemed to have been able to capture the relationship between RUNES and BRC20, and there was some competition. People often joke that Ordinals is an “alarming” ecosystem, and “Tao”The launch of the article “is imminent, which also means that this conflict of ideas will become a real war, a war between a new casino and an old casino.

“Gambling players” experience

For “gamblers”, the biggest difference and advantage of RUNES compared with BRC20 is that the trading experience of “casino” is better.

BRC20 requires two transactions to be engraved and transfer to be transferred in one time, while RUNES saves the step of engraving and only requires one transaction to complete.

“The selling process of BRC20 is that I need to first inscribe a transfer inscription, and then transfer the transfer inscription out, and then confirm on the chain. This requires two gases, two waits, time cost andMoney costs are very high. And it will cause a lot of more 546 sats in the wallet to be occupied, and these garbage will always exist.” Bitcoin Ecological Observer and Player 0xSea explained in detail to BlockBeats.

This means that BRC20 leaves more transaction records on the blockchain, adding additional transactions with each transfer, which not only increases costs but also increases network burden.In contrast, RUNES pays significantly lower and is more efficient.

From a cost perspective, the RUNES protocol can reduce the total cost of a minting transaction by up to 60%.In the interview, 0xSea commented: “RUNES does improve some of the problems with BRC20. For example, when dealing with small UTXO bloat, BRC20 requires additional inscribe operations, while RUNES does not, because it is based on the UTXO mechanism. Although thisBRC20 has also improved at one point, but RUNES has performed more clearly in the deployment of new currencies.”

This is also Casey’s dissatisfaction with BRC20 for a long time – generating a large amount of “junk” UTXO, and it is also the reason why Casey released the “rune” concept. Runes is native to Bitcoin’s Unspending Transaction Output (UTXO) model, which minimizes the number of unspent transaction output (UTXO) models.”Junk” UTXO generation, enabling more responsible UTXO management and smaller on-chain footprints.

“I really don’t like BRC20. The transaction requires so many Gas. When the Gas is expensive, the cost of casting, listing and selling is really high,” an anonymous community member was working with BlockBeats.said during communication.”Because of this, you have to basically double the money when you sell it. If there is no good support and a background for continuing development behind this token, then minting will be a loss.”

RUNE’s trading experience is more silky and uninspiring. The anonymous community member said bluntly: “In comparison, the multiple transactions and complicated steps of BRC20 seem bulky and time-consuming. Sometimes I even think that this is related to Domo’s own personality.Or it has a lot to do with the way of doing things. His progress in promoting BRC20 is really slow. Unlike Casey, everyone submits the code directly on GitHub, and Casey thinks it is OK and merges it directly.”

However, some community members believe that Domo’s prudence and steady progress are reasonable: “To a certain extent, it is acceptable to ensure the safety and stability of this system, it is acceptable to slow down.”

BRC20 Small and medium-sized assets are surviving

Some netizens once passed by “Atlantic City”. He said that there is no trace of prosperity in this city. Not to mention luxury cars, there are even fewer pedestrians passing by, just like an “empty city”.Although the BRC20 today is not an empty city like “Atlantic City”, there are rumors in the world that “RUNES will one day kill BRC20”.

Source: Internet

“There will not be much impact on existing head BRC20 currencies such as Ordi and Sats, but for small and medium-sized BRC20 currencies, RUNES will definitely have a big impact on them.” 0xSea said to BlockBeats.

0xSea further explained: RUNES’ threat to BRC20 can be viewed from multiple levels.For BRC20, Ordi has launched the largest trading platforms OKX and Binance, and their liquidity is mainly concentrated in CEX, so it will not be threatened by RUNES too much.But I think it will have a big impact on the newly issued currencies of BRC20, especially those with a market value of only a few million US dollars.”

This is also verified from the data.As of writing time, Ordi has risen from around $36 at the bottom to $49, a 36% increase, with Sats also up 14% this week.

Let’s look at the trading volume again. The Ordi /usdt trading pair’s trading volume in the past 24 hours reached US$208 million, while the Sats /usdt trading pair’s 24-hour trading volume reached US$97.97 million, but it is only US$130,000 and 38,000 respectively on the chain.USD transaction volume.Obviously, Ordi and Sats have more trading volumes on centralized trading platforms.

Source: Geniidata

According to Geniidata data, the only six of the 24-hour transaction volume of BRC20 on May 31st were wzrd, core, Piin, Piin, Ordi and PUPS.Looking at RUNES, according to Geniidata data on May 31, 17 tokens had a 24-hour transaction volume of US$100,000.

Source: Geniidata

“If you originally planned to issue new shares on BRC20, or the project party wanted to issue a new currency, in the current situation, you might choose RUNES. Because RUNES has obtained more on-chain infrastructure support in a very short time, such as wallets and minting platforms support. In the short term, RUNES’ traffic exposure far exceeds BRC20.” 0xSea told BlockBeats.

During the exchange with BlockBeats, the Shell Finance team of Bitcoin Eco-Lending Agreement revealed that they will use the NFT Fair Launch on the Ordinals protocol to complete the construction of the community core, the cold start of the product and the cold start of liquidity.Regarding the view that “BRC20 will be completely replaced by RUNES”, the Shell Finance team believes that this is not the case. “This view is only part of the right thing. RUNES assets do have an impact on BRC20, but the main impact is BRC20’s MEME coins.”

If you don’t want to be the BRC20 of Atlantic City, how to defend?

During the period when the gambling industry in Atlantic City was booming, theaters, theaters, concert halls, dance halls, gift shops, etc. serving the gambling industry were also opened and developed rapidly.At the same time, because it is a seaside tourist destination and a famous sanitation city, the world-famous seaside boardwalk is built along the coast. Therefore, the business of the casino has declined and Atlantic City has almost transformed into a tourist city with its main business in travel.

Now, facing the direct attack from RUNES and the attack from various other Bitcoin FT protocols, BRC20’s “casino” business is also undergoing “industry upgrades and migrations” as a defense.

5-character inscription and “self-casting” mechanism

“How should BRC20 be dealt with? Actually, I think many people in the BRC20 ecosystem have realized this problem, so they released an improved and upgraded version one to two weeks before the official release of RUNES. This update introduced five-character ticker, allowing the project party to self-mint (self-mint). This is entirely for the project party to consider, so that they can choose to self-mint tokens before deciding how to distribute them to other users. ” 0xSea analyzed.

At the time point on the eve of RUNES launch, BRC20’s recent update not only supports 5-character ticker, but also introduces a “self-issuance” mechanism, that is, project parties can deploy and complete token issuance on their own, and also support the combustion mechanism.

These updates have enabled BRC20 to complete a certain degree of industrial upgrading, which not only facilitates the centralized issuance of the project party, but also stimulates market performance through deflationary gameplay.Whether or not the founder Domo did it intentionally, it means that the two will have fierce competition.

After 5 characters were activated at block height 837090, the first enthusiasts who were scrambling to deploy five-character tokens even raised the gas cost to thousands of dollars.Some people even more attentively found that a user who was keen to rush to buy had engraved in his wallet address, “I collected these tickers in the hope of donating them for free to interesting, hard-working individuals or teams that are constantly built in the Ordinals ecosystem.”Inscription.

Currently, Unisat’s Pizza is in progress. It is also one of the 5-character tickers that were snapped up at that time and was given to Unisat by a community friend.

“After upgrading to a five-character ticker, this means that BRC20 has begun to shift from a MEME coin manufacturer to a systematic infrastructure and application of DeFi. RUNES is mainly impacting the assets and traffic of the four-character MEME coin, which IIt also agrees because it does have a great impact. However, for the Bifi scene on Bitcoin, it is the end of the asset protocol war. Whoever can attract more developers to build new applications based on asset protocols can laugh to the end. BRC20 has begun to enter, AVM is advancing, and Runes has not started yet. ”

Is “industrial migration” competitive?

Just like after “Atlantic City” was replaced by “Las Vegas”, it began to actively or passively develop the tourism industry.

After BRC20 is no longer the first choice of “gamblers”, it has also begun to actively or passively move industries, from “bitcoin casino” to the choice of DeFi infrastructure.”In the early days, we chose the synthetic stablecoin asset $BTCx issued on BRC20, because Shell Finance needed a Swap protocol and support from the service provider. In contrast, BRC20 has more mature infrastructure such as Unisat to help develop.” Shell FinanceSaid.

“With the development of the Runes protocol, we can also see that some DEX infrastructure projects have begun to be built on Runes. Whether MagicEden launches Runes Swap function or Runes DEX, they have begun to build infrastructure based on Runes. So we are also continuing toObserve and consider whether you should switch to the Runes track to build Shell Finance.” Shell Finance told BlockBeats.

With the development of Runes, if DeFi protocols also appear in its ecosystem, supporting functions such as mortgage and asset management, there will still be certain competitive pressure on BRC-20. It seems that BRC20’s “industrial migration” is not too much.Great long-term competitiveness and advantages.

In the long run, BRC20 also faces several threats: although RUNES is a standard at the Ordinals protocol level, its implementation itself does not rely on the Ordinals protocol. It is independent like Taproot Assets and RGB.The implementation of BRC20 relies on the Ordinals protocol. In the long run, the development of BRC20 appears to be passive.

Secondly, more “interaction” will be created between the RUNES and the Ordinals protocols.For example, the BLOB team Lianchuang is one of the developers of the Ordinals protocol and is currently developing recursive runes about the “linkage” between RUNES and Ordinals?

“The RUNES protocol cannot be viewed and evaluated alone. Ordinals should be put together to evaluate. This is an important dimension to attract developers.” 0xSea said this, and he agrees that the between RUNES and Ordinals is like soy milk with fried dough sticks.Just like the relationship between Ethereum’s ERC20 and ERC721, it will form a good synergy effect, and the effect is definitely one plus one is greater than two.”The interoperability between RUNES and Ordinals protocols may be doubled, but of course, the challenges for developers and projects are also doubled.”

Fortunately, for BRC20, RUNES’ infrastructure development is not yet fully sound, and DeFi infrastructure is in a swaying state.The faucet effect of RUNES has not yet been fully revealed. Apart from the rune stone’s DOG•GO•TO•THE•MOON, there is no particularly clear faucet on RUNES, unlike Ordi and Sats who have firmly sat on the “Dragon Chair”.

Faced with the encirclement of the new casino, how can the old casino continue to survive?During this critical year, BRC20 must give its own answer.