Check Your Wallets: Bitcoin Ordinals Runestones Are Being Airdropped

It’s raining Runestone. The highly anticipated Runestones airdrop took place late Thursday, sending Ordinal inscriptions to over 112,000 Bitcoin wallets.

“Something is happening!” NFT historian and Runestone spokesperson Leonidas said on Twitter. “112,383 Runestones are approaching Earth’s atmosphere. Brace yourselves for impact.”

According to the Inscription marketplace Ordi, collectors hoping to receive a Runestone in the airdrop must go to its Bitcoin Ordinals platform and enter their wallet address, and sort by newest.

“It's a decentralized, 100% volunteer effort—I tweeted the idea last month to do a massive airdrop to reward the year one Ordinals community,” Leonidas previously told Decrypt. “Over ten different companies in the Ordinals ecosystem have donated funds, engineering resources, etc., to help make it happen,” he added.

The Ordi Twitter account said Runestones will be mined and distributed to the year one Ordinals community in 81 batches of 1,400 over the next 48 hours.

“Remember that you earned your Runestone by showing up and participating in Ordinals when nobody else did,” Leonidas said. “This was the only way to get a Runestone and there was no team allocation or pre-sale.”

In a series of tweets, Leonidas updated Runestone collectors on the program of the airdrop.

“In the past 45 minutes, four batches of 1,400 Runestones have been inscribed and sent out to their destination address,” Leonidas said as the airdrop began. “Everything seems to be going smoothly. 76 batches of 1,400 remain and should be expected to take ~24 more hours.”

Behind the scenes, Leonidas highlighted Runestone partner Ordinalsbots, which is working to execute the rest of the massive inscription airdrop. Leonidas also noted that Ordinals marketplaces, including Magic Eden and Ordinalswallet, are working on indexing the Runestone inscriptions so that they can be traded on the secondary market.

“There is no shame in selling your Runestone,” Leonidas said. “Everyone has different life circumstances. Congrats to all buyers and sellers.”

Earlier this month, The Runestone, the largest ordinal inscription by block size at 3.97 MB, went up for auction. The winning bid for The Runestone, inscription 63,140,674, was 8 BTC, or around $572,973.

“It is an honor to finally be getting stoned with all of you,” Leonidas concluded.

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.