Runestone, a Bitcoin project led by the well-known digital asset collector “Leonidas”, is about to launch a huge airdrop to all regular users of the Ordinals protocol.

The addresses that have executed at least 3 inscriptions before the snapshot date will be rewarded, by minting pseudo NFTs or pseudo fungible tokens within the Bitcoin blockchain.

This is the first airdrop in this market niche, ready to pave the way for new incentive systems for the early adopters of the Ordinals community.

Let’s see below how to check your eligibility.

The Runestone project and the airdrop to the Ordinals community

Runestone, a new cryptographic project in the Ordinals ecosystem led by the leader “Leonidas“, is about to release one of the airdrops that will go down in cryptocurrency history.

The protocol in question simplifies the vision of Casey Rodarmor, inventor of the Ordinals technology, regarding the standard for fungible tokens runes that improves some critical aspects of BRC-20 such as the strong proliferation of UTXO (Unspent Transaction Output).

As soon as Runestone is launched, with the expected date by the end of the year following the Bitcoin halving, all users of inscriptions will be rewarded with a commemorative NFT depicting a large stone of considerable financial value.

In particular, this airdrop will be reserved for all early adopters of the Ordinals ecosystem who believed in the protocol in its first year of life.

The only way to have been eligible for a Runestone was to show up in the first year of Ordinals when nobody believed in this movement.

If you are getting one it is because you earned it.

Wear it as a badge of honor.

Airdrop farmers are out of luck. pic.twitter.com/jgEiRuElF6

— Leonidas (@LeonidasNFT) March 4, 2024

The airdrop is particularly interesting because it was designed to exclusively benefit the community, with no allocation for the project team and for investors whales who could sell on the shoulders of retail investors.

Everything was organized by volunteers from the Ordinals world, using an open source algorithm to determine the eligibility of users, with a total of 112,383 awarded addresses.

As highlighted by Leonidas himself in an interview with Decrypt:

“It is a decentralized effort, 100% voluntary […] There is no team allocation, no entity behind it, no utility and no roadmap. Over ten different companies in the Ordinals ecosystem have donated funds, engineering resources, etc., to help make it happen”

It is also worth noting that the so-called “runestones” have recently been involved in the two largest Bitcoin blocks ever mined in terms of the weight of the inscribed files.

In a real milestone for the Ordinals ecosystem.

One of these is the largest file inscribed on Bitcoin in the largest Bitcoin block in history.

The other is the second largest file in the second largest Bitcoin block in history.

Both are part of the largest airdrop in Bitcoin history; with zero team allocation. pic.twitter.com/RH3pTBffJB

— trevor.btc (@TO) March 3, 2024

The airdrop, as already mentioned, is reserved for all those who have completed at least 3 registrations during 2023, excluding registrations with file types that start with “text/plain” or “application/json”.

Instead, all transactions labeled as “cursed” are included, not included in the Ord indexer, not visible in the cryptographic markets and wallets.

According to the latest estimates, the NFT market Magic Eden currently contains over 74,000 cursed inscriptions.

How to check your eligibility: how much is this airdrop worth?

If during the past calendar year you have performed 3 inscriptions in the Ordinals protocol, you will automatically receive (without the need to claim) the Runestone airdrop directly into your wallet.

The snapshot date, as clarified by Leonidas, is represented at block height 826,600.
To check eligibility, simply copy your Bitcoin address into a specific interface, and check if it is present in the list of lucky addresses.

In detail, you can check on this Google document, or alternatively copy and paste the address into the OKX verifier.

Many people are probably wondering how much the NFT stone that will be airdropped by Runestone is worth.

Although it is currently not possible to make an accurate prediction as it will be (as usual) the market to determine the fair price of the airdrop, we can still estimate a value between 500 and 1000 dollars.

According to the pre-market data from “Whales market“, the latest Runestone sold before the actual listing in the real market was sold at a price of 545 dollars.

Currently buyers and sellers meet with an average demand of $486 and an average supply of $647.

As time passes and we approach the launch date of the cryptographic project, pre-market exchanges will become more important and will be increasingly representative of the first official price.

Regardless of the outcome, this airdrop will go down in history as the first official reward organized directly by a community of Bitcoin developers, who thank the early users of the Ordinals protocol for their trust and support.

Let’s take one last time the words of Leonidas, who in a recent post on X had expressed all his enthusiasm for the upcoming event.

According to technology pioneer Ordinals, we can expect an “airdrop season” for the Bitcoin ecosystem from now on, after the world Ethereum airdropped about 25 billion dollars to its users during the last market cycle.

The Ethereum ecosystem airdropped 25 billion dollars to itself during the last cycle.

Now it’s Bitcoin’s turn.

Ordinal airdrop season has arrived.

— Leonidas (@LeonidasNFT) February 20, 2024