Motivation for Runes

One of the primary motivations behind Runes is to create a dedicated, fungible token standard for Bitcoin without inheriting the complexity of Ordinals.

However, this is not the sole reason for its development. Casey Rodarmor noted that memecoins and speculation continue to gain traction across the crypto world, but largely outside of Bitcoin.

It was observed that after users speculated on other Layer 1 (L1) blockchains like Ethereum, Solana, or BNB Chain, they would often use a portion of their profits to buy the base L1 token.

For example, if a user made gains within the Solana ecosystem, they might be more inclined to purchase some $SOL with those funds.

Casey aims to see this cycle take place within the Bitcoin ecosystem and is extremely honest and direct about the purpose of Runes:

"Runes are a form of degenerate gambling… Runes are not the future of finance… Runes are a fungible token protocol, so that people can meme…"

This is a crucial point because some Runes issuers might promise a certain level of utility and value from buying their Runes. While this might hold true in the medium term, and utility may start to develop over time, we should not lose sight of the fact that part of the initial motivation for Runes was to facilitate speculation on top of Bitcoin.