It has been less than 24 hours since Rune was launched, and some people still don’t know what Rune is.

Do you also think that the name Rune sounds familiar, and how come it looks so much like an inscription?

That’s right, Rune is actually the second uncle of Inscription.

Do you know the Ordinals protocol, developed by Casey? The protocol is a system for numbering Sat (that is, Sat). Ordinals tracks them in transactions by assigning a serial number to each Sat. At the same time, users can attach additional data to the Bitcoin blockchain through Ordinals, making each Sat different, thus having the nature of NFT.

As a result, a netizen named domo developed BRC-20 based on the Ordinals protocol. The name BRC-20 sounds very similar to the Ethereum ERC-20 token standard we are familiar with, so we can simply understand BRC-20 as a copycat coin issuance protocol developed based on Bitcoin.

As a result, BRC20 became popular, and the transactions of its related tokens accounted for most of the Ordinals protocol, which seemed to make Casey very unhappy. So much so that when Binance launched the ORDI token, it mistakenly introduced the token on its official website as directly related to the Ordinals protocol. Casey directly sprayed online and asked Binance to delete the introduction related to Ordinals, saying that we have nothing to do with each other.

On September 26, 2023, Casey redeveloped a protocol called Runes, which is now referred to as the Rune Protocol, as a replacement for BRC-20. Runes are native to Bitcoin's unspent transaction output (UTXO) model. This minimizes the generation of "junk" UTXOs, thereby achieving more responsible UTXO management and a smaller on-chain footprint.

It doesn't matter if you don't understand the above sentence. You just need to know that the Rune Protocol is an upgrade of the Inscription Protocol.

The grandfather of Inscription is casey, and the father of Rune is casey. So Rune is the second uncle of Inscription.

At present, the Rune Protocol has not been officially launched, and Casey himself has tweeted that the first 10 "Rune" tokens may be "hard-coded", that is, they will not be open for deployment but directly written into the code. These first 10 "Rune" tokens will all be fairly openly minted, and there will be no pre-mining/pre-allocation.