Thread by @bweys_nft

With so many new people in Ordinals in past weeks, wanted to recap my thesis on RSIC

Think many aren’t familiar yet with the depths of the Ordinals eco, let alone with old as well as upcoming fungible token standards on BTC

So 🧵 here on RSIC (/ Runes)

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RSIC stands for Rune Specific Inscription Circuits

More on that later

So what are Runes, why are we excited?

Runes are a fungible token standard developed by Casey Rodarmor, who built the Ordinals protocol

Think ERC20

Recommend watching this Hell Money podcast with Casey

People love fungible tokens

So much so that soon after Ordinals released last year, some creative people came up with ways to make fungible tokens out of Ordinal inscriptions

@domodata is the brain behind BRC20. Name is an obvious play on ETH equivalent

BRC20s became hugely popular a few months after release

Some of the earliest BRC20 fair mints - ORDI & SATS - reached nearly $2bn FDV early this year, and not far from their highs today

So why do we need Runes at all?

Main “deficiency” of BRC20s is they are not that efficient

Trading them can clog up the Bitcoin network quite heavily

Can argue over whether that’s actually a bad thing imo

But either way, @rodarmor wants to release a more efficient protocol, more naturally using Bitcoin’s properties

That’s what Runes is. A protocol allowing more efficient trading of coins on Bitcoin

Now, Runes protocol will be released at the Bitcoin halving, on block 840,000

There will not be any Runes tokens live before then

Wait, so why are people excited, today, about something like RSIC, wen no tokens are live yet?

RSIC is a play on ASIC, which mines Bitcoin

RSIC therefore, is meant to be a Rune token miner

Every block, holders accrue tokens, which are like an IOU to receive actual RSIC runes tokens after the halving

PS: we don’t know what that token will be called yet

Wait, but there are other such miners out there, like Rune Guardians, Rune Mania, etc

What about RSIC is so special?

1.

For that need to go back to 21 Jan this year

RSIC team dropped 21k RSICs to holders of 9 top ordinal collections like OMB, Puppets, sub10k & more

Whole ordinals world was on 🔥 that week

RSIC immediately created a new meta

This is a position hard to usurp

Context here

2.

For me the most appealing aspect of all, beyond first mover advantage, is who may be behind this

Thru parent - child inscription, the ultimate parent of all RSICs, is inscription 126

One does not control this inscription since inception, if they are not an ordinals OG

Whoever controls it, was there at the dawn of Ordinals, knows all the key players, and must have been thinking of Runes for a long time

PS: they probs also control inscription 125 which says “Steady Lads”, words of the RSIC account’s first tweet

3.

Game theory is intriguing

• There’s not just a base level of mining per RSIC

• There is a boost level too, which requires holders to inscribe a boost

• There are different rarity tiers. What those mean, we don’t know yet, but we’ve seen 2BTC sales for rares already

• And, there is a total of 15% of supply to be raffled off at the halving, for those who hold their RSICs at that point. For context, at a $1bn FDV, that’s a total of $150mm to be raffled off 🤯

So, to take stock here:

• First mover, meta creator

• Team are Ordinals OGs

• Intriguing game theory bringing community together

This in itself would be enough to make RSIC a reasonably likely top Rune token, given attention grabbed

But there’s more, albeit speculative

In theory, RSIC’s mining job is done at the halving, wen Rune protocol launches

All tokens will have been mined

Which in theory means RSIC value after the halving should be 0

BUT, there are allusions to more coming for RSIC inscriptions at the halving

See dev here for example

What could post halving utility be?

We don’t know, frankly

• Some argue RSIC could continue mining other runes tokens later on. An infinite runes printer

• I’ve speculated the team could be building a new protocol. Hence name “RSIC Metaprotocol”

More on that in this tweet

Overall, speculation remains rampant, on:

• what rarity means

• what the team might be building

• what the post halving RSIC utility is

It keeps RSIC front of mind in the runes debate

Finally, importantly, all of the above has formed the strongest Runes community out there

That’s a powerful asset for the project, and the holders

Already have seen valuable airdrops to RSIC holders in the past month

RSIC holders, core Rune believers, remain top airdrop target

Any drawbacks? Yep ofc

1) we don’t know exactly what’s being built yet or what will be released

2) it is likely that Casey will hardcode the first 10 Runes into the protocol, ensuring no random party can claim the first Rune name

For some this was disappointing, as RSIC originally claimed in their whitepaper they were the “first rune token”. They quickly retracted this after criticism

3) there will be other Rune tokens out there obviously

Already a fair few other pre-runes projects (none with remotely same traction tho)

And high profile Runestones (with similar pre runes ordinals drop) with wide holder distribution, coming soon

In the end, if Runes fulfill their potential as a major fungible token standard on Bitcoin, there will be many winners

Many with multi billion dollar market caps

& based on above, I’m not betting against RSIC having good odds being one of those 🫡

There are more intricacies to all of this, but hope this gives some sort of idea as to what’s going on

Enjoy Runes ✌️

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