The launch of the Runestones airdrop by the Bitcoin Ordinals Project has sparked excitement within the community, with over 90,000 wallets already receiving their share of these unique tokens, now trading at around $1,200 on secondary markets.

The distribution of Runestones is ongoing in batches of 1,400, with a significant portion already sent to 112,383 eligible wallets, owned by 90,623 individuals, and stored in 102,201 user wallets. The current floor price for Runestones on platforms like Magic Eden and Ordinals Wallet stands at 0.018 BTC.

Participants in the Ordinals ecosystem earned their Runestones through active engagement, as highlighted by NFT historian Leonidas, emphasizing the absence of team allocations or pre-sales. This "fairdrop" precedes the introduction of the Runes protocol by Casey Rodarmor, designed to provide an energy-efficient alternative to the BRC-20 token standard by utilizing UTXOs (unspent transaction outputs) for data inscription on the Bitcoin blockchain.

The Runes protocol, set to launch soon, will convert each Runestone into a Runes token, marking a significant step in the evolution of the Ordinals ecosystem. With Runestone's market cap estimated at approximately $125 million and a 24-hour trading volume of 170 BTC ($11.5 million) on Magic Eden, these tokens are gaining traction in the crypto space.

Ordinal inscriptions, akin to NFTs, enable the embedding of non-financial data like images, text, and videos onto the Bitcoin blockchain, associating them with individual satoshis, the smallest unit of Bitcoin. This innovative approach opens up new possibilities for data inscription and tokenization within the Bitcoin ecosystem, showcasing the potential for creative and diverse applications in the realm of blockchain technology.