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Bitcoin Runes — Hidden Gem or Overhyped?
Background
The Bitcoin halving event on April 20, 2024, brought renewed attention to a key figure in the ecosystem: Casey Rodarmor. He introduced a new token standard called the Runes protocol. Casey Rodarmor has been contributing to the Bitcoin ecosystem as a software engineer for several years. He started his studies at UC Berkeley in 2006 and graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science in 2009. After finishing his studies, he joined Google in 2010 as a site reliability engineer. After leaving Google, he applied to Chaincode Labs to work on Bitcoin Core, the protocol’s main code implementation. Later on, Rodarmor started his own research about Bitcoin mechanism and found a better way to handle Non-Fungible-Tokens (NFTs) compared to Ethereum. This was his foundation of the Ordinals protocol in 2022. Despite the hype of the new era which the Ordinals protocol created, the negatives of the protocol kicked in. Heightened interest to Ordinals created raised transaction fees and network congestion in the Bitcoin ecosystem due to the limited block space. To overcome these issues, Runes protocol was brought to life. Since 2021 Rodarmor has been a software engineer for Agora and became the founder of Ordinal Labs which was launched on January 21, 2023.
