What happened after the Runes protocol went live with long characters, incomprehensibility, and skyrocketing rates?

Author: Bitrili

X/ Twitter: @lilyanna_btc

1. When the character count is long, and the words are complete, it becomes hard to understand

Due to the character length limit of the Runes protocol, most tickets are 13 characters or more, with names, domain names, slogans, and various gameplay emerging. Many people have adapted to the concise 4-character BRC-20, and are not used to such long Tick names, but in fact, it allows for greater creative space, especially for many OGs in Western communities, who are having a blast with various memes. Runes will gradually evolve its own Tick meme culture.

When launching new tokens, in addition to researching the background of the tokens, you can also do an initial screening from the parameter level.

🔸 Is the premine ratio reasonable? Be cautious if the mouse warehouse is too serious.

🔸 Is the cap (total number of tickets) sufficient? Be cautious if the number is too low.

🔸 Are there enough holders? Be cautious if there are only a little over 100 holders and the tickets are almost sold out.

🔸 Be cautious if the progress exceeds 90%, as the recent fee fluctuations are too large and can easily lead to losses.

🔸 If you prefer assets that play on both Eastern and Western consensus, check if the token's name aligns with Western culture; names that are obviously Chinglish may be harder to understand.

2. On-chain fees have skyrocketed, leaving many confused

Transfer network fees, market transaction scanning fees, and network fees for preparing wallets to split Dummy UTXOs…

These fees have always existed; they were just previously a few U or a dozen U. Recently, fees have increased tenfold, and network fees have climbed to the hundreds of U, causing everyone to suddenly realize these costs.

Not long ago, I provided a tutorial for everyone to prepare wallets, and when funding new wallets, I suggested splitting a few Dummy UTXOs of 600 satoshis. The tutorial was too long, and many people missed that part.

A friend on WeChat went to the market to buy goods with a fee rate of over 2000, only to be prompted to prepare a wallet, spending 800U on network fees just to split Dummy UTXOs, and hadn’t even entered the formal transaction process. I felt sorry for him when he showed me, but network fees go to miners; that’s just the rule on the BTC chain, and it can only be considered tuition.

Additionally, as I mentioned before, when fees exceed 300, scanning orders on Magic Eden incurs network fees of over 100U+. Some people still haven't realized the wear and tear of network fees, going back and forth with a flurry of operations, only to wonder, "Where's my balance?"

These fees cannot be avoided; you either wait for the fees to drop before operating, or you play on Layer 2, where gas fees are lower!

3. Can I transfer? How do I place an order? Can I split?

1️⃣ Common wallets like Unisat and OKX already support Runes transfers, so you can use them with confidence.

2️⃣ Currently, the order placement experience in most markets is still quite basic; you directly select the UTXO where the rune is located and place orders based on UTXOs. This is likely due to security considerations, starting with basic functions, and more complex and flexible markets will emerge later.

3️⃣ Splitting and merging: The Runes protocol itself has very useful splitting and merging operations, but similar to the previous point, early infrastructure platforms may not have directly supported this for security reasons (after all, Runes has a cenotaph setting, and if not handled properly, all runes in the input could be burned).

In the short term, if you want to merge Runes balances into a large UTXO, you can achieve this by transferring within your wallet.

For example, if you have 8 x tokens, each with 100, spread across 8 UTXOs, you can transfer 700 x tokens to yourself in your wallet, merging them into one UTXO. After the transfer, you will have 1 UTXO with 700 x tokens and 1 UTXO with 100 x tokens, which you can then place orders for separately.

(! Note: The transfer process also incurs network fees! The more UTXOs you transfer, the higher the network fees!)

The same applies to splitting; just transfer the desired number of tokens to yourself.

4. Is that all there is to the Runes protocol? Nothing exciting, let’s disperse

The Runes protocol has only been officially launched for 2 days. Due to the relatively conservative nature of early infrastructure, various advanced operations like UTXO reuse, bulk airdrops, and flexible order placements have not yet been experienced. Check back in two weeks.

BTW, the elegant operation of efficiently airdropping runes to thousands of addresses in a single transaction has already been practiced by the devs of Rsic! Check it out here: https://mempool.space/tx/0a0d73b38bf4dedbf108f4196618a7ae4b1b5c0600af4d384fba03d8932e428d

5. Sharing a bit of personal experience on choosing fees

First, check the Mempool. If the last block was produced more than 5 minutes ago and the ticket I’m working on is less than 60% complete, I would roughly choose the fee rate at position ① in the image (which is a bit to the right of the recommended fee rate, around the 70% position).

If the last block was produced less than 5 minutes ago, and there’s still a while until the next block, I might choose position ②, around the 90% inflection point. If my ticket has already exceeded 70% progress and there’s a lot of FOMO on-chain, I might directly give 150% of the recommended fee rate (for example, if the recommended fee rate is 100, I would give 150 or even higher).

I’d rather pay a higher fee than get stuck in the mempool or buried.

Disclaimer: This article is for reference only and should not be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or any other advice. It does not represent the position of RunesCC.