The first token has risen by more than 10 times. What is the new Bitcoin ecosystem asset protocol Alkanes?

"Methane" is the hottest word in the Bitcoin ecosystem recently. As the first fairly minted token for the new Bitcoin ecosystem Alkanes protocol, the market value of "Methane" METHANE has exceeded US$6 million, which means that each METHANE is more than US$60. The editor asked some Bitcoin ecological players who participated in minting. The cost gap of minting is relatively large. If the minting cost of minting is taken as the benchmark, the profit of minting METHANE has exceeded 10 times.

How did Alkanes' new asset agreement come out when the Bitcoin ecosystem is deserted for a long time?

Agreement background

The predecessor of the Alkanes protocol is called Protorunes, which is "programmable runes", and the founder is the same. This thing briefly attracted attention from the Bitcoin ecosystem in the middle of last year, and runes were still quite popular at that time.

The agreement founder @judoflexchop is the chief technology officer of Bitcoin wallet Oyl Wallet. This wallet may not have many users in the Bitcoin ecosystem, but it is still well-known. Take a look at its financing situation and you will know why:

On March 8, 2024, Bitcoin infrastructure company Oyl completed a $3 million Pre-Seed round of financing, led by Arca, and participated in the investment by Foresight Ventures, Maelstrom, Domo, UTXO Management, Taproot Wizards CEO Udi Werthheimer, Kanosei and FlamingoDAO.

Due to the participation of Arthur Hayes, this wallet’s popularity in the Bitcoin ecosystem has opened up very quickly. Mid last year, Oyl launched a Bitcoin NFT project called "Airheads" because of the relatively high minting prices. In terms of NFT's price performance, this is a "failed" project, but it has recently risen by nearly three times due to the hot Alkanes protocol.

Although they all make wallets, in the Bitcoin ecosystem, the major wallets are basically not just wallets. For example, OKX, UniSat, Magic Eden, and Oyl, the protagonist of this article, have many other Bitcoin ecosystem businesses outside the wallet, and only Xverse's business scope is more "focused". Back to Oyl, in addition to their wallets, they also made a Bitcoin RPC called "Sandshrew" and the Alkanes protocol.

Now Oyl is fully promoting this agreement, and the official name is also brought with him:

Cause of the hot

Alkanes is a new Bitcoin asset protocol. Overall, it borrows the Runestone structure of the Runes protocol, but it is more scalable and supports smart contracts. As mentioned earlier, the predecessor of this protocol was Protorunes. From the name, Protorunes looks like a "magic modified rune", but it is not. Simply put, the Runes protocol and "Runestone" structure are like closed iOS, while Protorunes and Alkanes are like open source Android.

Protorunes is equivalent to the "Runestone" of the Runes protocol. The "Runestone" here is not the NFT with a strong wealth-making effect in the early runes, but the "transaction data encapsulation" of runes. Simply put, it is a piece of information embedded in Bitcoin transactions, and it is the basis for index to determine whether there is a rune operation in a transaction.

If the indexer finds that the "RUNES" logo exists when scanning the OP_RETURN of each transaction, the identification data will be parsed, such as etching, casting, transfer, etc. "Runestone" is like an operation guide, and the indexer uses the guide to obtain index results.

"Runestone" is an operation guide limited to the Runes protocol. It corresponds to the Runes protocol single-line, while Protorunes is different. Most directly, we cannot directly let the Runes Protocol indexer implement such actions, "I am a Runestone-based subasset protocol, please index me together", but Protorunes can. Everyone can customize their own new asset protocol according to the data format of Protorunes. These protocols will be assigned a "Protocol ID". The indexer will read the "Protocol ID" to determine which protocol specification to parse.

There are some modular distribution chains like Ethereum that make things easier. For developers, just use the tools provided by Oyl to do it, and there is no need to make a set of indexers yourself.

As for the implementation of smart contracts, before OP_CAT is resurrected, the idea of ​​trading contract data and off-chain index execution cannot be deviated from too much.

In addition to the technical level, there are two main reasons why this agreement can take off. First of all, it received strong support from the Chinese inscription player group. There is no doubt that the most consumer-friendly player group in the Bitcoin ecosystem is the Chinese inscriptions player group. This group is quite special. The PvP angle of Solana meme coins is redundant in the Bitcoin ecosystem, but it is not easy to win the recognition of the Chinese inscriptions player group. Once the inscriptions take off, they will spread in the WeChat group quite quickly and have a motivation to incite.

Searching for the keyword "Alkanes" on Twitter, you will find that most of the sermons are from Chinese people, and the founder of the agreement also posted a Chinese push to thank the Chinese community for their support. iDclub, the early minting tool of the Bitcoin ecosystem, set up a trading market for the Alkanes agreement, and it was also made by Chinese people.

The second reason is that the project parties of this agreement have a background, and according to the plan they revealed, it is not just to issue an asset agreement to "drag traffic" to their wallets. They also plan to do AMM, BTC staking, stablecoins, MEV tools and trustless ZK bridges, which is equivalent to building a BTCFi ecosystem around this protocol.

The logic of the entire narrative makes sense, an asset agreement that supports smart contracts is applied around this asset agreement. If the project party without background comes out to talk about this narrative, it will be difficult to convince. After all, in the Bitcoin ecosystem, players still have some pain to the decline of Atomicals, and there is too much uncertainty in big things that mature teams can't help.

Protocol leader

- METHANE, the first fairly minted token in the Alkanes Agreement, with a current market value of approximately US$6 million. The Chinese meaning of Alkanes itself is "alkanes", while the Chinese meaning of METHANE is "methane", so BUTANE "butane" and HEXANE "hexane" are also mentioned by players, but both of these tokens are currently only worth about US$250,000.

- DIESEL, from the official and the first token deployed by the Alkanes protocol, has a current market value of approximately US$12.6 million. The mechanism of this coin is quite special. The total amount is only 1.562,500 coins, 28% reserved by the team, and 72% are produced block by block as each Bitcoin block, and the output follows the halving time of Bitcoin and is halved. In each block, the DIESEL minting transaction with the highest miner's fee will eventually obtain the DIESEL output of the block. In a word, each block sends DIESEL once, and there is only one person in each block (the person with the highest metered miner who scores the highest meter) can mine DIESEL. This ordinary player is basically unable to cast it, and scientists will automatically directly monitor the miner's fee and keep increasing.

Because METHANE is fairly cast, the holder group/chip distribution is definitely healthier than DIESEL and fully circulated, so on social platforms, METHANE's voice volume is far higher than DIESEL. If you don't look at the market value and just look at the voice volume, you will feel that METHANE is the leader. What empowerment will DIESEL have in the future? The official has not disclosed any further information. Therefore, METHANE is far ahead at the community level, and DIESEL is in its official background and potential future empowerment expectations.

Conclusion

This agreement is still in a very early stage, and the support of the assets of the agreement by various wallets has not yet been kept up, so it is best to use Oyl Wallet to interact with the assets of the agreement to ensure the security of the assets.

The success of this agreement basically brings together the success elements of the Bitcoin ecosystem new asset agreement - "main network assets", "fair minting" and "Chinese support". With the narrative of "smart contracts" and ecological layer, the Bitcoin ecosystem has broken through the siege after it was deserted for a long time. I hope that the ecology can be built in the future and go further and further.