1. Introduction

Casey Rodarmor's Ordinal Theory provided a special lens through which to view Bitcoin. It revealed individual satoshis (the smallest units of BTC) as unique digital objects.

This made these satoshi-objects immutable collectors items, giving them similar properties and values to that of NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens).

The community stretched Casey’s notion further, and quickly rendered entire token ecosystems from the Ordinals' breakthrough.

One such member, domo, even invented a way to create fungible “BRC-20” tokens, a token standard similar to Ethereum’s ERC-20.

While BRC-20s were an ingenious Ordinal-based fungible token prototype, they were created as an experiment and face significant limitations compared to their ERC-20 counterparts.

This is where Runes come in. Also created by Casey, the Runes Protocol is an attempt to introduce a native, optimized implementation of a fungible token standard for Bitcoin.