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From Concept to Consensus: The Rise of Runes as Bitcoin’s Asset Layer
Recorded: June 23, 2025 Duration: 1:07:03Space Recording
Short Summary
The discussion highlights the RUNS protocol's resilience and growth in the Bitcoin ecosystem, emphasizing its potential to evolve as a foundational asset standard for DeFi applications. Insights from industry leaders reveal a trend towards innovation and the integration of Bitcoin-native assets, positioning RUNS as a key player in the future of decentralized finance.
Full Transcription
Music Thank you. Music Thank you. Music Thank you. Hi everyone, we are getting started here and Barbara said something came up last minute and
she can't join this space right now, but he'll join later. And Zaf just
messes me saying his connection is messed up and cannot speak for now. So let's just keep chatting
and once their connection is back, I'll put them right into our conversation. And yeah, welcome.
I am the host, Shen, and I'm really excited to have you all join us today for this special space.
And recent data shows that the RUNS protocol, despite a cooling market, remains a key player in Bitcoin ecosystem.
At its peak, like last year, RUNS accounted for like even 80% of Bitcoin's transaction volume.
here for like even 80% of Bitcoin's transaction volume.
And even now, top runs like Dock still dominate with a market cap of $273 million.
So today we got to discuss the rise of runs as Bitcoin as a layer.
So before diving, we now have to greet the amazing guests attending today.
First up, Mr. J. So glad you are here to discuss Runs Online Magic with us.
Please say hi to our audiences and introduce yourself a bit.
Hi, Mr. J. Hello, hello. Hi, everyone. I'm Mr. J. You can call me Juga.
Hi everyone, I'm Mr. J, you can call me Juga.
I'm an ordinal enjoyer and right now I'm also an alkanes enjoyer as well.
I'm very excited to talk about runes, my experience of it throughout these three years.
throughout these three years.
OK, thank you, Mr. J.
And appreciate that intro.
And pleasure to have you here.
And Ray, you're up next.
Please greet audiences and introduce yourself a bit.
OK, hi.
I'm Ray.
I'm the founder and CEO of Bitomini. Bitomini is a chain abstraction
protocol delivering Similis Web 3 experiences for developers and users. Taiki is our flagship
dApp in the Bitcoin ecosystem. It's a native Bitcoin and ruins gaming playground powered and Ruins Gaming Playground, powered by on-chain randomness.
It is still in its beta testing stage,
but we have two mini games ready.
One is called Locky Pump, and another one is CoinFlip.
So if you are a Bitcoin holder or a Ruins player,
come to our platform,
highkey.run, and play some mini-games.
Thank you, Ray, and glad to talk with you guys.
And now, let's get the ball rolling.
Firstly, let's talk about the Runes status,
where it stands today and where it's headed.
We posed this question because since RISC announced,
we've seen it rapidly emerge as a protocol of choice
for Bitcoin native assets.
And as we can see, tons of developers
are increasingly adopted for tokens, NFTs, and on-chain games.
Yet interestingly, BRC20 continues to maintain strong traction
in the ecosystem.
So that raises some crucial question for our guests.
Is Ruin simply an upgraded BRC20 alternative?
Or are we witnessing something more transformative?
Is that the beginnings of entirely new infrastructure for Bitcoin assets?
And looking ahead, how do we see this kind of standard competition
playing out so yeah Mr. J can you please share your insight with us yeah um sorry uh what was
the question again uh basically on the current state and future of runes right yes that's a question
um so let's go back to the beginning of runes i would say they were pretty much
expected to be a better brc20 brc20 was an inscription based token model on Bitcoin.
And then runes actually continued that to be a UTXO based token model.
And this was done because there were too many,
what people call trash inscriptions on chain.
Basically a lot of the mint, send, transfer inscriptions on chain basically a lot of the mint send transfer
inscriptions that they wanted to reduce the network bloat
however this didn't really do much to it because as we all know the mempool is currently pretty
quiet and there's not a lot of blocks to fill up anyways.
So let's look at the other innovation that they did,
which is to be able to shrink the number of steps required
to trade.
So instead of creating a mint transaction,
a mint inscription, and also a transfer inscription
to be able to transfer.
Now you can just basically split the UTXOs, then you split your runes.
So this one is more efficient compared to what BRC20 has done.
But if you look at the hype and volume, BRC20 is still the king in terms of in terms of that runes is still pretty new and uh trying to take over the stage of this we we see a lot of uh this narrative of um dog and going to different
chains to actually generate more volume and this is um i would say, a pretty interesting direction
as runes continues to build.
So dog is currently the most notable rune
and there's also quite a few of notable runes as well
like pups, magic internet money and stuff like that.
So I'm looking forward to see where Ruins goes from this.
So I'm looking forward to see where runes goes from this.
Thank you, Mr. J for sharing.
And how about Ray?
How do you think about the Ruins' current situation
and the future potential?
So ever since the Ruins protocol launched,
it has been a super hot topic in the Bitcoin space.
And we are seeing a lot of builders
shift their attention from BRC20 to Ruins.
And the big question everyone's asking is,
is Ruins just a better BRC20 or
as a completely new stuff um I mean like BRC20 was clever no doubt but it's kind of uh hacked
the ordinal system to let people mean tokens on Bitcoin using JSON files but at the
end of the day it wasn't really scalable. Yeah it bloated the chain, relied on
indexers and wasn't particularly aligned with how Bitcoin actually works at the
protocol level. Ruins on the other other hand, feels much more intentional.
It is designed to work with Bitcoin's UTXO model,
as mentioned by Mr. Jay as well.
So instead of forcing smart contracts behavior onto Bitcoin,
it embraces the native architecture.
It's cleaner, linear, and way more scalable.
So I get why people say Ruins is just the RC20 downright,
but personally, I think it is more than that.
This isn't just a fix, it's a shift in direction.
So Ruins gives us a native protocol friendly standard
that can actually support real applications.
Let's say BTC5 or games,
or maybe even infrastructure we haven't thought of yet.
It's setting Bitcoin up, not just as a store of value,
but potentially as a programmable ecosystem.
So we are already seeing signs wallets are integrating ruins projects or launching token
tooling specifically for it. There's buzz around building DAXs and BTC by
around building Daxes and BTC buy, that's on top of it. Even miners are eyeing there.
This because of the new fee market it could create. BRC 20 is still around. Lots of liquidity
and the active users as mentioned by Mr. J earlier. That's true. But momentum is shifting, at least in my perspective.
If you are a builder, it makes more sense now
to start with ruins rather than try
to patch around BRC20's limitations.
In short term, they'll probably coexist.
They are now.
And BRC20 isn't going away overnight.
It has its community.
Can you still hear me?
My ear bug feels weird.
Yeah, I can hear you.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, I guess it's noise canceling.
So yeah, I was saying in short term,
they'll probably coexist, but yeah, BRC20 is gonna stay.
It's going away overnight.
It's still important and lots of users and holders
like that has this community and meme culture,
but in the long run,
I think ruins has the staying power.
It's like comparing ERC-20 to earlier token standards on Ethereum.
The cleanest, most extensible standard tends to win in that situation.
So to me, Ruins is one of the clearest signs that Bitcoin is entering a new phase.
Not just a digital goal, but as a platform or network where people can build real decentralized systems without needing to leave Bitcoin's security model behind.
And if Bitcoin is having a renaissance, as people are saying,
ruins is the brush we are painting it with.
So yeah, that's my opinion.
Thank you, Shane.
Thank you, Ray, for your sharing.
And I noticed that Barbara is online now.
Barbara, can you accept my invitation as speaker?
Hi Barbara
Okay
Then just go ahead and
Yeah, so that needs us to why builders are betting on RUNS long term.
So we are seeing many builders are choosing RUNS not just for its technical improvements, but because of its alignment with Bitcoin's core principles.
So my question will be, from your perspective, whether as a developer or participant,
what's the most disruptive innovation in RUNES
and what critical issues does it solve
that previous standards like BRC20 cannot?
So we'll start from Mr. J.
Mr. J, please.
Yeah, as I mentioned before just now,
RUNES actually shifted from inscription-based model
to UTXO-based model.
And I do agree with Ray.
It does make a lot of changes and efficiencies
to how we actually visualize trading tokens on Bitcoin.
When you talk about building dApps,
enabling programmable runes,
this was actually not really the outright intention
or not the outright result when KC actually created runes.
So I think what happened later on was that the team at Oil Wallet
actually came in and built upon runes
with something called proto runes it is quite similar to runes as well the infrastructure
for developing for enabling runes and proto runes are pretty much similar as I've learned from developers
and this actually brought programmability to Bitcoin like right now we can see there's
already smart contracts on Bitcoin enabled by the Alkane's Bitcoin protocol they do this through compiling Rust through Wasm.
They basically zip these smart contracts, put it on chain,
and then it can be utilized after that as well.
So I think builders are committed long-term to runes because it was a start to a whole new revolution in BTC5.
We are probably going to see an AMM directly on Bitcoin in the coming months as well.
So it is very, very versatile.
And yeah, it really did open up the doors for a lot of possibilities on Bitcoin and BitcoinFi. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. J. Thanks for your thoughtful sharing. And let's now pass the mic to Barbara.
Yeah, Barbara, our question for now is what's the most disruptive innovation in ruins and
is what's the most disruptive innovation in ruins and what issues really matters do you think does
it solve? Hi, Barbara. Hi, can you hear me now? Yeah, yeah, I can hear you. Oh, hi. Sorry. I'm sorry
about that. I was trying to join, but it didn't let me. Good to be here. So can I get the question again?
Yeah. My question is, what do you think is making rooms disruptive and what issues really
matters does it solve? Oh, I mean, like with BRC20, it did bring a lot of fairness and people just wanted to use it.
However, it brought bloating of UTXOs.
So runes came to disrupt that.
When KC created runes, he wanted to give DGens something that was different,
like a non-UTXO bloating way to trade fungible tokens.
And he called it shitcoins on Bitcoin.
And I remember when he said that, when he decided to do that, he said, this might be my worst idea yet.
However, there was a lot of anticipation for runes people wanted that because it was
coming from Casey Rodham or the creator of of the Ortingles protocol um so because of because of
that anticipation not just because of the anticipation Casey um designed runes with some principles like the making it utxo native um it
wasn't reliant on on jasing it wasn't spammy um as usual and with runes you could um you could
trade it differently from brc20s there wasn't the inscribed transfer issues that BRC20s had with runes you could trade
it, yet it still had the issues around splitting due to the UTXO model that it had. But that UTXO
model made it closer to Bitcoin than anything else. And I do think, what was the other one?
What is it disrupting? What's the second? What was the second question, Shane?
Yeah, second question is, what issues, what key issues that previous standards fail to solve, but rules can the these kind of key issues oh yeah okay I think that was I was
responding to the second question yes so the BRC20 did cause a lot of bloating and it wasn't very
easy to trade even though it was free and fair it wasn't very easy to trade I do still have some
BRC20 tokens in my wallet that I just didn't trade because sometimes imagining the process of
inscribing transfer of that token and then inscribing transfer it again to split,
inscribing transfering it to split it and then inscribing transfering it again to actually trade
it. With runes, we did not have that issue of you know inscribing transfer to trade we just had the
tokens but we needed to split that so i think that runes solved even though it didn't completely
solve it but to an extent it solves the issue of trading shit coins on on on bitcoin i made the
easier than trading brc20s and the the second was the UTXO bloating.
If you remember with the BRC20 meta protocol,
the moment any BRC20 token was minting,
it was a tad difficult for you to do any other thing
because it bloats.
The mempool goes really crazy
and the fee rates spike so high
that regular users would have to wait
for that brc20 token to finish minting before they're able to uh maybe um perform transactions
at a more cheaper rate runes solved that we don't have yeah there are certain times when we have
spikes in the memple but now we don't have it as much as we used to have it when we had the brc20 um
meta protocol as more popular i mean it's still popular we have the brc 2.0 coming
however um this was what i think runes solved and um popularity in terms of popularity of of of um shit coins on bitcoin
brc20 was more popular but runes was became more popular than the other meta protocol standards
you know there were other meta protocol standards that existed apart from brc20
meta protocol but the brc20 meta protocol was the most popular one when runes came
it sort of took that popularity slightly away.
We had more people that anticipated it,
and more people started to trade runes token
because they believed that that would be maybe the standard
that everyone prefers, you know?
Yeah.
Okay, thanks. Thanks, thanks Barbara for sharing. And I would like to ask Ray, from your hands-on experience,
so what do you think is making rooms disruptive and what issues does it solve?
What key issues does it solve?
Okay, that's a great question.
I think Mr. Jay and Barbara pretty much covered it all,
and I tried to add something on it.
I think what's really drawing builders to ruins
beyond the technical improvements
is that it feels native to Bitcoin, which is essential.
It respects the UTXO model.
It's minimalistic by design
and it avoids the sort of data bloating
that we saw with BRC20 and the inscriptions.
And yeah, Mr. J mentioned that,
Barbara mentioned that because it's kind of like
the key feature of the ruins.
And we don't, yeah, we don't see,
I agree with Mr. J that we don't see many activities
right now in the mempool, but once we do,
ruins is gonna be the saver for that.
And to me, the most disruptive aspect for RUNES
is that it brings fungible tokens into Bitcoin
in a way that's trustless, composable, and indexer agnostic.
So you don't need to have off-chain coordination
or special parsing logic to understand token balances ever since right there
in the UTXO set, that's a big deal.
The BRC20, as creative as it was,
always feels like duct tape to me.
It relied heavily on centralized indexers
to track balances and basically stuff
token data into parts of the chain that were not designed for that. It worked, but it wasn't
sustainable. Ruins fixes that. It gives us a cleaner, more Bitcoin aligned primitive for building tokenized systems,
whether you're making a mint coin, a community token
or something more advanced like a Bitcoin DeFi platform
or on-chain gaming playground like Taiki,
Ruin's just gives you a more solid foundation.
And here's the thing, it doesn't just solve the technical problem,
it also solves a philosophical one. Ruins respect Bitcoin's conservative ethos.
And it's not trying to reinvent the wheel with full-blown smart contracts and all that.
It's saying that let's keep it simple,
secure and scalable. That's my side resonates with a lot of people in the Bitcoin space.
So yeah, thank you, Shane. Yeah, that's all I want to share.
Thank you, Ori, as well. And so, yeah, RUNS actually solves real problems like engagement boosting, index improvements,
less junk UTXOs, and reduces mempool fees, all that good stuff.
But like the speaker mentioned, other protocols are out there too.
So with a lot of protocols competing, will this fragmentation last?
As we know, Bitcoin asset ecosystem is increasingly fragmented,
like BIC20, RUNS, Olinos, and Alkens all compete for much share.
So do you think this multi-standard environment is sustainable or will Bitcoin eventually converge on one dominant
asset protocol which is very similar to ERC-20 on Ethereum or is this diversity here to say
exactly reflecting Bitcoin's decentralized future? So let's start from Barbara.
Yeah, Barbara, what's your view on this?
Oh, I think that Bitcoin is Bitcoin.
I don't think that it's going to standardize like Ethereum did with ARC20.
I don't think that that's going to happen.
I'm saying this because with the originals protocol, it did open the eyes of a lot of builders to say that there are certain things that you could do on bitcoin so i believe
that we are still in the um experimental phase and that phase is going to take a while for it
to happen we have the runes um protocol which was created by the creator of the Ortingos theory. We have the BRC20 token,
the BRC20 meta protocol. Now that is being upgraded to BRC 2.0, which solves the problem
with the original BRC20 meta protocol. And that was created shortly after, you know,
the Orginal's protocol went live by Domo Data.
And then we have, like,
we have all these new meta protocols coming on.
We have the Alkings meta protocol.
We have ArchNetwork working on their thing.
We have the, what are those other ones?
Was it Atomicals?
Not exactly sure. We had the cbrc20 so yes we do
have a lot of meta protocols and we do have a lot of people who are still testing out to see
um whether this would work or not so i believe that big bitcoin has its own strength in you know
like and the fact that it's allowing people to explore
um all these different opportunities that exist for the builders so um something that might be
so i think that uh i don't want to pick sides but i think that if we ever have a winner it might be ruins but i don't think we would ever
have like a strong winner that would say this is the um standard um meta protocol and standard
fungible token meta protocol that people should use i don't think that we would ever have that
one would always have people who are going to keep trying out and building, you know, things that they think would work,
would be better, would feel better.
In terms of programmability,
we're seeing our kings with smart contracts
that they're, you know, hoping to do.
It's already live.
So, yeah, people are able to utilize that.
We have our network that is going to go live in the summer.
So we're looking forward to that.
We have the BRC 2.0 upgrade that is coming in August.
So with all these upgrades happening and all these builders looking for one way or the other to have not just a meta protocol where people could trade fungible tokens, but a meta protocol where people could explore options like DeFi on Bitcoin.
So it's going to be a tad difficult that's that's that's what I think though um so a lot of people might choose runes you know um because of um um it's um uh it's history because of the
the creator and because of um how how much acceptance it's gained since its creation.
But I stand neutral at this point.
Thanks, Barbara.
Yeah, I think this kind of diversity is exactly the thing that makes Bitcoin exist in chaos.
So thank you.
Thank you for your impressive sharing.
And Mr. Jay, could you please share your view on this with us?
Yeah.
I think we need to look at Bitcoin differently from other chains like barbara has mentioned
before as well bitcoin is based on a consensus and community consensus kind of like structure
so if you're talking about like one particular standard that's going to be dominating over
everything else i don't think that would be very possible and another thing is that
when there's competing protocols then there will be like better innovation as we usually see in
even irl with different industries and all that everyone's trying to make their product better
their community better everyone's trying to improve. Uh, personally, I think there's always going to be different, uh, protocols
trying to say, oh, we are better at this.
We're better at that.
Um, but the key thing is which one is the most, uh, easy to use, which one stays
true to the, which one stays true to the Bitcoin.
And really depends because there's many ways to look at this.
Number one is like ease of use.
Number two, probably is going to be how, how, how true is it to, to the
ecosystem, to Bitcoin, like ray has mentioned multiple times just now
it's really hard to say which one but uh right now uh i personally am looking more into
alkanes as they are enabling smart contracts on Bitcoin without trying to change anything on Bitcoin.
We don't require like,
it doesn't require anything like OPCAD,
which would probably might not even happen.
Discussions takes years
and it is happening already right now on Bitcoin.
There's probably about eight or 10 smart contracts live
on Bitcoin that people probably don't even
know about but it's already gaining popularity among people from ordinals and rooms and
i would say everyone should just keep an open mind and try out new protocols
it doesn't matter which one but as long as you're trying and experimenting with everything,
you're definitely going to see either benefits financially or community-based benefits as well.
Thank you, Mr. J, for sharing and also sharing your experience on hand.
And Ray, how do you view this question?
Can you share with us about this question?
Yes, this is a really important topic because right now Bitcoin's asset ecosystem is starting to look like a bit of patchwork.
We've got BRC20, BRC100, Atomicals,
and Ruins, RGB, and now Alkanes,
as mentioned by Mr. J, which is interesting.
I haven't got a chance to take a look into Alkanes,
but I will do since it's mentioned by many people already.
Yeah, they're all trying to define what it means to have assets on Bitcoin
or more potential, more interesting things.
So the big question is, will we eventually consolidate like Ethereum did with ERC20
or are we just going to deal with the diversity?
So from my perspective,
I think that we are still in the exploration phase.
Each of these protocols is testing a different approach,
whether it's inscription basedbased, UTXO-native, like ruins,
or off-chain with zero-knowledge commitments,
like RGB experiment.
This experimentation is healthy.
It reflects Bitcoin's open decentralized ethos
where no single-party gets to impose a standard, which, yeah,
I totally agree with Mr. J on this.
We should be open, try new stuff
because, yeah, competition is good
and we always welcome new protocols
and new things coming to the ecosystem.
It is fun, it's a super fun phase for builders and all these pioneers. But at
the same time, developers and users eventually may crave simplicity. The moment serious BTC adepts and token economics emerge, the market will naturally start to gravitate toward one or two
dominant standards, probably the ones that are easiest to build on, most secure, and the best
aligned with Bitcoin's architecture. So if I had to guess, i'd say runes is the front runner right now
uh it's clean native to bitcoin doesn't require complex option logic and already has momentum
with wallets and infra projects um rgb is incredibly powerful too but it's heavier and harder
to onboard for the average builder.
And the outcanes sounds interesting,
but I have no saying on that
because I haven't really take a look into that.
So yeah, so to answer the question,
yes, I do think we'll see a convergence eventually.
Not necessarily because of some top down decisions, but because
the ecosystem will reward the standard that balances security
ease of use and scalability. And ruins checks a lot of those
boxes right now. So that said, I don't think full fragmentation is a failure.
In Bitcoin, diversity isn't the bug.
It's a part of the resilience.
But we'll likely see a natural winner emerge,
just like the ERC-20 did.
Not because it was forced, but because it was made
the most sense and
chosen by the users,
by the market.
Thank you, Shane.
Thank you, Rui.
And Rui said
we'll see a convergence
in the future.
And some guests
said we're probably hard to see a unified standard in the short term.
So speaking of diversity, let's talk about
RUN's use case. Right now, RUN's projects focus on
financial use case, like trading, mining, and fee arbitrage.
But here comes the question, are there any directions
emerging beyond financialization?
For instance, NFTs, games, DAOs, and etc.
And do risk projects need to be highly financialized to gain earned traction?
Or are we going to see a broader range of applications soon?
So Barbara, would you mind sharing your insight with us on this question?
Well, I do think that we're going to get some games. We're going to get people experimenting
with, in fact, we've seen people experiment with runes and art. I don't know if anyone saw that recently, where there was this particular art community that had to,
what's the word now? I'm trying to find the word. But yeah, so there were, for every time you hold,
for every runes token you hold, you're holding like a piece of the art of that particular artist.
So yeah, we are going to see runes evolve from just like people trading it
to people utilizing it for stuff like gaming, for gambling.
And actually we've seen like a lot of communities just emerge from trading
to even building out tools that people could use.
For instance, we checked the rat fight community coming from the fragmentation was the word I was
looking for. Thank you, Mr. J. Yes. So yeah, people have done that. So you're able to fragment
the piece of art using runes, the tokens and if people are able to
do that it means that they are able to to build games here if people are able to build games it
means they can't do the same for music and this there's a particular um line in runes that isn't
activated yet i'm trying to remember what it's called um if i remember that i'll share
it so but there's something that isn't active yet with runes that if if that gets active it becomes
like a re a huge game changer for the things that we're we're able to do with runes um uh
dgens and builders are always exploring the depth of what you can do with it uh we have the likes of
builders like life of fifo always experimenting to see what you can do more with um the runes token
and um as i was just trading it i do think that casey really loved the fact that people could
meme with things like crazily you know know, like memeing the funniest ways.
And I think I got that with tokens like,
rune tokens like Mr. Yen,
where their mings were so on point.
We've seen the likes of Billy
moving on from just like people trading their rune tokens
to having Avon merch,
you know, like the Billy glasses that people could connect with,
that people could actually, you know, like, share with their family and friends.
We have the dog community moving on from just, like, trading the dog token
to having stuff like even the dog TV.
There's a particular dog TV that is live 24 7 on it's
streaming live 24 7 on on x and it has like drama in it like you could just watch the stories so i
think there's going to be like a lot more evolution that is tied to um to runes than just than just actually trading the tokens um we've also seen we're also seeing
stuff like um taiki i was taking a look at it recently and i'm like oh my goodness like there
are tons of stuff that you can do with this you know um or gambling is almost sort of like trading
you know but yeah like there are tons of things that you can now that will be able to do with
runes i i believe that i do uh i i think that what people are waiting for is um for some sort
of momentum to come back and then you just like see people dropping the things that they've been
able to do i mean there's even staking as well. With fluid tokens,
I think they were hearing this space a while ago.
With fluid tokens,
you're able to stake runes and earn runes.
But that still also falls a little bit on the trading.
Lending, there's lending as well.
Instant loans.
So yeah, possibilities do exist. But I hand over to Mr. Jiang. I'm
sure he probably knows more than me in that aspect.
Thank you. Thank you, Barbara, for your sharing and also the recent interest in Taiki. And
yes, we are starting to see experiments with other verticals like games, art, and mimetics.
And thanks.
And next, Mr. J, what's your insight regarding this question?
Yeah, I think Baba pretty much covered a lot of it.
I think there's also lending as well that you can do with runes.
The thing is, right now, most of these applications are great.
And however, they're not really fully on chain.
But at the same time, it is also exploring what runes can do.
I mean, you can pretty much do this with BRC20s as well
if you're not doing it on chain
but the thing is is it efficient uh to do it on chain as well so i think there needs to be a
balance between a very good user experience and how much of a quote unquote decentralized way you
want to do it right so um taking it to runes as well uh if everything can be done on
chain and be and have a very good user experience why not just do it on chain and it also comes
to the next topic which means if you can do it on chain on bitcoin why not do it on chain on
bitcoin then you don't have to actually bridge it out.
You don't have to deposit into someone's wallet, be it multi-sig or not.
So I think right now we are at the stage where things have to happen
and some compromises can be made.
I think during the time of last year, we saw a lot of these Bitcoin layer twos trying to expand upon Bitcoin assets, particularly with runes as well.
So these are all on chain, but they're not on the Bitcoin chain, so to speak.
There was quite a bit of rejection from this.
I personally experienced it myself as I was building on a Bitcoin layer two as well.
But now with the possibilities that I'm seeing with Alkanes, which built further on runes,
I think there is a possibility where we could see a lot of on-chain experiences directly on bitcoin itself
and i would say these are probably a more viable path moving forward
there's already infrastructure for a lot of platforms like magic eden
the infrastructure for a lot of platforms like Magic Eden, Liquidium to support runes.
So it's just another step forward from that. We see that Unisat actually just
supported Alkanes as well because they already have the existing infrastructure for that.
So whether trading markets are the only viable path for runes projects right now, I don't think so.
There's a lot that we can explore.
And ultimately, I would hope to see that all these types of explorations can be done directly on chain.
Thank you, Mr. J.
And you see some products have already shown RINs
potentially broader applications.
And you also mentioned that the key relies on that
it will lead the bridge to other chain,
which would limit the development of RINs.
And so, Ray, I want to ask ask how do you think about this question and also the
question is heavy financialization still a master for earned traction and which verticals aside
from it do you think will gain real adoption first hi ray
Hi, Ray.
Yeah, I'm here.
So, sorry, what was the question?
Yeah.
My question is, is heavy financialization still a must for early traction?
And which verticals, aside from financial use case, do you think will gain real adoption first?
Okay, yeah the current wave of food ruins activities, they're definitely financialized.
We see a lot of trading, minting, flipping or even fee arbitrage. That's where the early energy is,
just like what we saw with BRC20
or even earlier Ethereum tokens
and the Solana ecosystem and all that.
And that makes sense.
I think speculation is often the ignitions,
which it brings in liquidity, attention,
and experimentations, which are quite essential.
But I don't think trading markets are the end game for ruins.
Not at all.
In fact, we are already seeing the beginning of a shift.
And that's exactly where projects like Taiki come in.
Thank you, Barbara, for queuing us.
Yes, and I'm glad that you took a look at the product,
and maybe you found that a bit interesting.
At Taiki, we are building a Bitcoin gaming platform
that integrates runes not just as speculative tokens
but as an essential part of the gameplay rewards and the user engagement and we are using bitcoin
ruins to introduce elements like on-chain randomness, fair play, game economics,
and even more, maybe some meme-driven social layers in future, all trustlessly without needing
a smart contract platform for the assets.
But we do need some backend,
some smart contract logics for the game plays
and the ruins long launching and trading.
But that's another story.
So yeah, from my perspective,
Ruins is actually a primitive
for building more expressive systems on Bitcoin,
not just trading tokens, but more.
It gives us the foundation to design probably fair decentralized
economies in ways that were not possible before. So of course, financial use cases will dominate
early as we see now, but that's where the tension right now, but not, I don't think that's always
going to be the case. The attention is going to be shift to other more fun stuff, as well
as tools and the standards mature. I strongly believe that we will see a broader range of Ruins powered applications emerge.
So we are trying to contribute to that.
Taiki is not here just to mint coins.
Minting coins is important, trading coins is important as well,
but we are also trying to build a Bitcoin native entertainment
and financial layer, and and ruins is a key part
to that vision.
To me, IK is heavily rely on ruins right now,
but yeah, we open to other possibilities,
but we will focus on ruins and make some fun games
with ruins and bitcoins so that users can come and play easily
and so maybe contribute to a mass adoption of that.
So yeah.
Thank you, Shane. Thanks, Ray.
And as we noticed, the rune ecosystem
is providing its versatility, and we believe it would become
the unifying layer for multiple applications.
And yeah, then the next topic, let's zoom out
to rune's role in BTCPY.
Yeah, as everybody can see, BTCPY is heating up, but true coin-native assets are still in very early development.
So my question is, do you believe RUNs can evolve into the standard token format for Bitcoin-based DeFi and examining AMMs, lending and stablecoins, what makes runs suitable
or challenging for compulsive finance and how does it fundamentally differ from EVM tokens?
Yeah, let's start from Barbara.
oh i i that's why sometimes i don't like to sit um in classes so they don't ask me questions first
um but yeah i i think that that might happen but it's going to take a lot of time and tooling
but what is happening now is the fact that we have Alkings utilizing programmability on Runes,
on the Runes protocol.
That is happening.
And that is bringing DeFi capabilities to Bitcoin.
And it's quite native because Runes is native UTXO-based.
With Alkings, you are able to do smart smart contracts on bitcoin for instance you say the
the clocking system is something that happens when you send a transaction at a certain block
which is the 144th block and when you do that you are basically telling um your fellow um
oil core colleagues or maybe like you're telling the people who are checking on
that you were here, you know, you were there at the particular block. But that wouldn't be possible
without that smart contract that Jim Mark created. And not just that we have things like life of people working on alking pandas where you can swap your panda to a fungible
token the panda is um is let me call it a non-fungible token but now you're able to swap
it to fungible tokens and you could also swap that fungible tokens back to um the non-fungible token if you do want, right?
And then the third thing that you can do with the bamboo tokens when you do that is that you can send those tokens into the forest.
So something similar to Satoshi Dice,
where when you send the tokens into the forest,
the tokens could come back to you doubled
or might not even come back to you at all.
And those things were not possible.
I mean, they weren't possible a year ago,
but they are possible now.
And they're possible because there's a meta protocol
that is making runes programmable.
I do know that, yeah, you might not be able
to bridge your runes over to Alkings,
but if they're doing this on top of runes,
and I think that by extension,
that is runes making, powering BTC5.
But if you're going to look at it like directly,
like on runes proper, yeah, of course.
There's a thing that's, what runes proper? Yeah, of course. Uh, there's a thing that, um, what's that platform?
There's a thing that dot swap is doing now. Uh, um,
oh shoot. I'm trying to remember. So there's a thing that dot swap is doing where you're able to,
um, put your, put your runes in the market like you it's sort of like an amm but it's
powered differently hold on i'm i'm just i'm going to find it i'm going to find it because it's it's
extremely important that i mentioned that um right here because um it sort of um shows us what is
possible in terms of um bitcoin defy with with runes. So I think it's called .swap nexus.
And with .swap nexus, you have some sort of decentralized liquidity.
So you can initiate a swap using .swap.
However, it's now a little bit trustless.
So users, you as a user and the market maker can sign
and then the swap is confirmed on bitcoin you don't have any middleman you don't have
any wraps tokens just um just bitcoin so that's what they say um they're doing and they're doing
this based off of something that um casey roddham had highlighted as a thing that could possibly work with runes,
if people are looking for ways to have more liquidity on runes.
What I don't know is if people actually understand it and how it works,
or if people are actually providing some liquidity,
or if people are actually the market making with it.
But it was something that went live in May, towards the end of May, 27th of May, I guess. And that is one possibility.
We see Liquidium, Liquidium WTF, they make it possible for you to take a loan on your ruin
and repay that. And it's actually quite instant. They have instant loans happening.
And we also have like founds.
Is it found?
They're called founds.
They're also working on a lending protocol
and that would involve runes as well.
I've also mentioned fluid token
where you're able to stake.
And you're staking,
you're not signing a contract,
you know, to stake that like um you still
have they use something called time lock they use something called time lock on on bitcoin for you
for you to be able to stake your runes token and earn some reward um maybe more runes or whatever
the the community decide for it so that is just the beginning it's um rune is a year uh plus old and
i think that there's more time to see more things that you can do with it radfi protocol is also
able to um you're also able to swap on radfi as well and it's a little bit faster and you're also
able to provide liquidity and that's runes you also able to provide liquidity and that's runes.
You're able to provide liquidity to the native runes tokens like Cubs, Dog and a few of them that are on the platform.
So I do see that happening. I only think that it's just going to take a while for us to get to its fullest.
to get to its fullest.
Okay.
Thanks, Barbara, for elaborating on Ruin's potential
to empower real BTC5.
But since it's going to take time and tuning.
And then, Mr. Jay, what's your view on this question?
Yeah, I kind of agree with Barbara.
You know, if you're talking about BTC5, yeah, I would say Runes already is the power of BTC5 right now in many ways, right?
The only thing is, you know, going back again to is it on chain or not uh i would say
if it's uh as a um token standard yes it's really it's already powering btc fine uh you've already
got lending uh you've already got gaming uh like what tai Chi is doing as well. You have stable coins as well.
I think it was BAM USD.
That's already happening.
There's so many applications of BTC5 from runes right now
runes right now that you can pretty much find on twitter for a quick search is just uh
that you can pretty much find on Twitter for a quick search.
it would be much better if everything was on chain um i would say that with how alkanes is
improving upon the runes protocol it does make everything possible on chain. Like I mentioned much earlier before as well,
there's going to be AMMs.
There's already smart contracts on Bitcoin.
Multiple use cases.
You have like something like ERC404,
like Barbara was saying just now with the pandas.
And you can interact directly with the smart contracts
on Orniscan as well.
So yeah, Runes actually does power BTC5 right now in various applications.
Most of them are off-chain.
There are some like TimeLock which is on-chain right now on Bitcoin.
But I would see a future where it would be more adapted towards the Alkanes ecosystem as this is everything we all wanted,
I think about more than 10 years ago,
which is to have programmable tokens on Bitcoin
and to have a more programmable Bitcoin itself.
So Alkanes are opening up that possibility.
And I would say it's really all thanks to the kickstart
that we've seen with runes and although it might not be now for the short term but in the long term
i do see a lot of these d5 applications happening uh directly on bitcoin itself be it runes or some other token standards. But as of now, mindshare with runes is definitely the highest.
And yeah, we have to acknowledge that as well.
Thank you, Mr. J for sharing.
And let's turn to the next speaker, Ray, please.
Okay.
I think Bob Ryan and Mr. J, again, pretty much covered it all.
I'll try to add something to it, maybe.
I think I completely agree with Bob Ryan and Mr. J, especially especially Ruins is pretty much the standard of BTC-PHY right now.
But I mean, from where I stand, both as a builder and someone working on a BTC-PHY- related platform, I do believe that Ruins has the potential or is already the foundational
asset standard for Bitcoin DeFi.
If you are thinking about building AMMs, lending protocols, as mentioned earlier, or even stablecoin systems directly on Bitcoin.
You need a token format that's deterministic, composable, and trustless.
Ruins provides that base.
You can represent balancedness directly in TXO, design vaults, or liquidity structures,
and where the value flows using Bitcoin's native rule set.
And of course there are challenges. You don't get the flexibility of touring complete logic like
what we have in EVM. Therefore the design space is more constrained and building complex DeFi logic will either require
lever off chain coordinations
or some sort of layer two integrations,
which is the road to Taiki took.
But maybe for all kinds there are other possibilities.
But yeah, here's the key difference.
Runes doesn't try to turn Bitcoin into Ethereum.
It keeps Bitcoin's simplicity intact
while opening the door for composable finance
as more secure, more auditable, and far more aligned
with Bitcoin's ethos.
So yes, I think I do see Runes as the BTC DeFi standard, not just for trading,
but for powering the next generation of Bitcoin decentralized financial applications. Thank you, Shane.
Thank you, Ray, for elaborating on how we empower BTCFY and share insights into its future potential.
We look forward to seeing all these possibilities
metronized into real-world use case and ultimately become the key power of BTCPY.
And all right, everyone.
Today we've covered RUN's technical age,
its competition with BRC20,
its potential beyond speculation and financial case,
and how it reshapes the
fight in BTC ecosystem.
Yeah, big thanks to our guests for attending this space and unpacking those questions so
clearly.
And thanks to our audiences for attending and listening to today's space.
And yeah, that's a wrap.
And thanks to everyone.
Okay, have a good day, everyone.
Thank you for having me.
Have a good day.
Bye-bye.
Thank you, Barbara.
Thank you, Mr. Lee.
Thank you, everyone.
See you next time.
See you.
See you next time. See you. See you.
