The founders of Bioniq, a bitcoin-based collectibles marketplace, launched Odin.fun on Thursday in an effort to revive the tepid Runes meme coin market by emulating Solana’s extremely popular Pump.fun token launchpad.
Bioniq CEO and co-founder Bob Bodily told Decrypt that Odin.fun allows users to issue Bitcoin-based meme coins in a similar manner to the popular Solana application, with a design centered around speed.
According to the press release, the platform features two-second transaction finality, ensuring traders don’t have to wait for meme coins to enter (or leave) their wallets.
“Meme coins need to trade at the speed of light,” Bodily said. “One of the things about the Degen mentality is that you have to be able to sell your position instantly because people are frantically overbuying things and when they look at the charts, they get anxious.”
Runes, which were launched by Casey Rodarmor last year on the occasion of Bitcoin’s so-called four-year halving, are actually meme coins based on Bitcoin, however, due to Bitcoin’s lack of smart contracts, they have some technical quirks compared to meme coins issued on Solana or Ethereum.
NFT marketplace Magic Eden has supported Runes since its launch, and users must trade Runes in batches. For example, buyers cannot specify a specific number of Runes, but must look for transactions in a series of batches listed by sellers.
On top of that, Runes transactions are usually limited by Bitcoin’s block time, where a new set of verified transactions is added to Bitcoin’s blockchain every 10 minutes.
The friction caused by Runes has sparked negative discussion online. Runes was active at launch, accounting for 81% of Bitcoin network activity, but enthusiasm has faded.
Major runes have come under pressure over the past week, with projects like DOG•GO•TO•THE•MOON and PUPS•WORLD•PEACE each seeing a 10% drop in price, according to Magic Eden.
“There’s been a lot of turmoil in the community over the last week and a half or so,” Bodily said. “There’s a really good fungible token standard on Bitcoin — but it’s still pretty crude.”
Meanwhile, Pump.fun has become a giant on Solana, raking in millions of dollars in fees on the endless tsunami of meme coins, a platform whose simplicity allows anyone, even children, to issue meme coins with just a few dollars’ worth of cryptocurrency.
Like Pump.fun, Runes created through Odin.fun are initially traded on a “bonding curve,” meaning the price of a Rune will rise along a predefined curve until it reaches a market cap of one Bitcoin, at which point the token will be transferred to Odin.fun’s built-in automated market maker.
Bioniq began developing Odin.fun three months ago, and Bodily said the platform’s secret weapon comes down to DFINITY’s Internet Computer (ICP). Bodily said Bioniq used ICP’s blockchain network to effectively create an “underlying” application chain for Odin.fun called Valhalla, enabling a faster and smoother transaction experience than the Bitcoin blockchain alone can provide.
Odin.fun also aims to provide a seamless trading experience by leveraging so-called session keys, so that users don’t have to sign off on every transaction.
Bodily said that Odin.fun is currently in beta with about 200 users testing the app, so while the app may not have an immediate impact on rune-related activity, it will be fully released on Monday.
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