With the launch of the Runes protocol scheduled for this weekend to coincide with the Bitcoin halving, Ordinals explorer Ord.io is beefing up its finances, announcing a $2 million raise on Wednesday. The company announced it would use it to hire more developers.
Bitcoin Frontier Fund and Sora Ventures led the pre-seed funding round. Other investors include Eden Block, Arca, Longhash Ventures, Daxos Capital, Portal Ventures, UTXO Management, Rubik Ventures, VitalTao Capital, Antalpha Ventures, Kommune Fund, Edessa Capital, PetRock Capital, PG Capital, Shake and Bake Productions, Re7 Capital, and Balaji Fund.
Ord.io, launched in March 2023 by software developer Zach Meyer and pseudonymous NFT historian Leonidas, allows users to discover, upvote, and comment on Ordinal inscriptions. Masu.
“I am very excited about the wave of innovation and exploration that is emerging in Bitcoin. Products and technologies that were previously constrained to various alternative chains are being reimagined and built on top of Bitcoin.” meyer said in a statement.
“In the past few years, much of the developer excitement was focused on projects like Ethereum and Solana, but we are seeing Bitcoin regain mindshare among developers.” he continued.
Collectors can sort their searches by indicators such as the number of inscriptions and whether the inscriptions are “cursed” or “normal.” Cursed Inscriptions refer to ordinal numbers that are no longer visible in wallets or marketplaces because the Ord indexer initially overlooked them.
Inscriptions can also be searched using specific attributes, or attributes called “satributes” in Ord.io. For example, an inscription labeled “Pizza” includes the coins that Laszlo Hanec used to buy two Papa John's pizzas in 2010. This is the iconic “Bitcoin Pizza” incident.
According to data compiled by Dune, more than 65 million writes have been made on the Bitcoin blockchain since the Ordinals protocol was launched in January 2023.
In September, Ordinals creator Casey Rodarmor announced plans to launch the Runes protocol to power fungible tokens on the Bitcoin blockchain. Runes aims to solve many of the problems facing Inscriptions in Ordinals, such as wasted block space.
Rune Protocol is scheduled to debut in time for the Bitcoin halving, which is currently expected to take place on Saturday. This is said to be a more efficient way to mint Bitcoin-fungible tokens than his Ordinals-based BRC-20 standard last year, which began as an experiment. Some of his BRC-20 tokens lost significant value in the run-up to Rune's launch.
“We believe rune minting will be a very popular activity on the Bitcoin network over the next year,” said Ord.io co-founder Leonidas. Decryption. “We expect half of Bitcoin transactions to be minted, and we see a great opportunity to help build the experience around minting. This starts with discoverability.”
Leonidas said Ord.io is focused on the early stages of Rune's rollout and emphasized his belief that Rune will become the leading alternative token protocol for Bitcoin. Looking to the future, Leonidas said Ord.io will continue to focus on customer needs and improve the user experience by simplifying the platform.
“Once you feel like a feature is complete, you have to go back and try to find at least one way to make it better,” he said. “If you do that over and over again, you can create something very special.”
The future of Runes is unclear, but despite the hype around its launch, Leonidas said the main point of this funding is to continue building on top of Bitcoin.
“When someone comes to Bitcoin wanting to collect JPEGs, trade meme coins, or do DeFi, we want to be the trusted platform they come to,” he said. . “While it is difficult to know exactly where we will be in five years, one thing is certain: we will continue to build on Bitcoin, and only on Bitcoin. .”
Edited by Andrew Hayward
