About Runes Protocol

Suggested by Casey Rodarmor, the creator of the Ordinals protocol, Runes is a proposed protocol designed for the issuance of fungible tokens directly on the Bitcoin blockchain. This implies the ability to create and manage tokens that are interchangeable and divisible within the Bitcoin network, similar to the functionality of ERC-20 tokens on the Ethereum platform.

Runes is a new fungible token protocol for Bitcoin. Creating a good fungible token protocol for Bitcoin might bring significant transaction fee revenue, developer mindshare, and users to Bitcoin. Additionally, if this protocol had a small on-chain footprint and encouraged responsible UTXO management, it might serve as harm reduction compared to existing protocols. At least one of which, BRC-20, is already quite popular, and has the undesirable consequence of UTXO proliferation.

Compare Runes and BRC-20

Detail	BRC-20	Runes
UTXO-based	No	Yes
Ordinals Theory-based	Yes	No
Token Type	Fungible	Fungible
On-chain Footprint	High	Minimum
Lightning-Compatible	No	Yes