"Recursive Rune" is coming?

Author: Cookie, Rhythm

In the early hours of today, the co-founder of the Bitcoin NFT project Blob and the current 6th ranked contributor to the Ordinals protocol, @Elocremarc, posted the following tweet:

"The time has come, recursive runes!"

As I write this article, the floor price of Blob has already risen by 30%, breaking 0.04 Bitcoin.

So, we know "recursive," we know "runes," but what are "recursive runes"?

Let the inscriptions "move" with the runes

Everyone should have some understanding of the role of "recursion," which serves as an "on-chain pointer" that allows inscriptions to reference Bitcoin on-chain data, including data from other inscriptions. The supported reference data includes the latest block height, specified block heights, data from other inscriptions, etc., which are also known as "recursive endpoints."

The idea proposed by @Elocremarc is to add a "recursive endpoint," namely "/r/output." Once the "/r/output" recursive endpoint is added, developers will be able to determine the corresponding number of runes from transaction outputs and whether there are other inscriptions, which will allow inscriptions to change based on the number of runes.

From my current understanding, this requires keeping the corresponding inscriptions and runes in a single UTXO (otherwise, when the balance of the runes changes, it will not be possible to obtain the balance changes of the runes from the transaction output, thus causing the inscription image to change accordingly). From this point, we can look forward to the emergence of this gameplay, for example, etching an inscription while also engraving a small image, where the small image will vary based on the number of corresponding runes.

Deeper gameplay, such as the Bitcoin full-chain game mentioned by Pizza Ninjas CEO @TO (for example, one NFT equals one game account, and runes are game currency that can be directly read on the NFT), may require further foundational support.

Finally, it should be noted that the addition of the "/r/output" recursive endpoint is a prerequisite for @Elocremarc's proposal. Currently, @Elocremarc has submitted a PR on the official Ordinals GitHub, and if it passes smoothly, we will have "recursive runes" to play with.

Conclusion

"Runes" have been the absolute hot topic in the crypto market over the past week, but despite the high level of attention, they have not shown a good profit effect. In addition to the project's "pre-mined runes" and the kind of "fair minting" that BRC-20 once played with, "runes" may need more gameplay to stimulate interest. If "recursive runes" can be quickly implemented, it will undoubtedly give "runes" a shot in the arm.