The inventor of Bitcoin Ordinals has proposed a new fungible token protocol called Runes as an alternative to the BRC-20 standard, which has a market cap of $1 billion. The issue with BRC-20 tokens is that they create "junk" Unspent Transaction Outputs (UTXOs) that spam the Bitcoin network. Runes employs a UTXO-based system that fits more naturally into Bitcoin and promotes UTXO set minimization.
While acknowledging that most fungible tokens are scams and memes, the creator believes that a good fungible token protocol for Bitcoin could bring significant transaction fee revenue, developer mindshare, and users to Bitcoin.
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