Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Now Holds the Ultimate Runestone Ordinal – Here's Why

The creators of a popular Bitcoin Ordinals project called Runestone on Wednesday sent the original “mother” inscription — which they estimated to be 8 BTC, worth about $525,000 — to a wallet said to belong to mythical Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto belonged.

The runestone – ordinal inscription 63,026,232, the largest inscription mined to date at around 4 MB – was sent to the Satoshi wallet by project employee and pseudonymous NFT historian Leonidas. In a Twitter post, Leonidas acted as if the move was a mistake and that there was nothing he could do to get the Ordinals inscription back.

But ultimately the post was a joke, echoing a seemingly very real joke shared this week by the developer of a Solana meme coin called Slerf after that developer legitimately burned large portions of the token allocation. As eagle-eyed Crypto Twitter users observed, Leonidas was merely a meme.

“Guys, I messed up. I burned the parent runestone inscription worth 8 BTC. The transaction has already been mined so I cannot reverse it,” he wrote in a tweet very reminiscent of the real Slerf tweet. “There's nothing I can do to fix the problem. I’m so damn sorry.”

Guys, I screwed up. I burned the parent runestone inscription worth 8 BTC.

The transaction has already been verified, so I cannot reverse it.

I can not help it.

I'm so damn sorry. pic.twitter.com/FsVCrNHUgh

— Leonidas (@LeonidasNFT) March 20, 2024

So why send a valuable Ordinals asset to the wallet of the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, who has never been identified and has not been heard from in over 13 years? Leonidas said that the ultimate goal was to “burn” or effectively destroy the inscription by making it inaccessible, thus preventing any changes to the collection.

“It is the parent inscription of the runestone collection, so by burning it we sealed the collection on the chain,” Leonidas said. “There can only be 112,384 runestones at any one time now.”

A parent/child inscription refers to how the history of the ordinal is determined and traced, making a third generation inscription the “grandchild” of the original ordinal. In the case of the runestone, once burned, no future or “minor” inscriptions can be created from it or associated with it.

As Leonidas explained, the shipment of the runestone to Satoshi's wallet was carried out in collaboration with OrdinalsBot and Marathon Digital Holdings, which partnered to mint the runestone inscription.

While the creation of the large runestone itself required two Bitcoin blocks, OrdinalsBot co-founder Bruffstar said that sending the inscription to Satoshi was no different than sending regular transactions.

“This is simply because of the way the Ordinals protocol works,” Bruffstar said. “These things are written in at the time of the transaction, with the ordinal index analyzing these transactions as they go through. The thing I sent you is actually just the Satoshi,” he said, referring to the smallest dominance of a Bitcoin. (Yes, it is named after the creator of Bitcoin.)

“It was always part of the design that we would allow this block to be moved into Satoshi’s wallet at the end of the process,” added Toby Lewis, Head of Strategy at OrdinalsBot.

Last week saw the highly anticipated Runestone airdrop, where 112,383 inscriptions were sent to eligible wallets as a reward for early followers of the Ordinals movement and holding inscriptions in the first year of the protocol.

“Remember, you earned your Runestone by showing up and participating in Ordinals when no one else would,” Leonidas said. “This was the only way to get a runestone and there was no team allocation or pre-sale.”

After the airdrop, over 83,000 wallets have a runestone inscription. The Runestone collection has a current floor price of 0.0526 BTC, approximately $3,445, with a total trading volume to date of 882 BTC ($57.8 million) on the Magic Eden Bitcoin marketplace.

Edited by Andrew Hayward

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