Someone airdropped 21K ordinals to Bitcoin users as part of a mysterious game.

Sparking the latest mystery surrounding Bitcoin Ordinals, someone airdropped 21,000 digital inscriptions on Sunday as part of an apparent gaming promotion.

“The technology arms race has begun. 21,000 state-of-the-art RSICs manufactured in our factories are being shipped from our distribution centers to the Ordinals community,” read 56,754,110 times. “RSIC is designed for the sole purpose of securing rune bags. These runes will be engraved in our mint after the launch of the rune protocol on Bitcoin.”

The group behind the airdrop calls itself Runecoin, but appears to have no connection to the Runes concept, designed last year by Casey Rodarmor, the original developer of Ordinals.

Runecoin rules establish the backstory. All 21,000 RSIC inscriptions were initially manufactured, but no more can be produced due to “mysterious explosions at factories and distribution centers.” These RSICs will be airdropped to the Ordinals community, giving RSIC holders three options: rune mining, selling RSICs on the market, or destroying RSICs. Runecoin said 10% of RSIC is reserved for game designers.

What adds more mystery to the game is that the top inscription simply says “Distribute more inscriptions.”

Last week, a message on the Bitcoin blockchain contained a riddle that caused quite a stir in the Ordinals community.

“10,000 Saturdays, side by side” is the message found on 55,365,041 ordinal inscriptions. “It is a single, untouched UTXO inside. We were born together and cursed in our hearts. Built with Code, Bitcoin Art.” The mysterious message was followed by a series of numbers: 391481082118 – 391481092117.

According to Magic Eden, the phrase “game” has sparked excitement among some Ordinals believers, with over 33 BTC and a trading volume of around $1 million to date. But others questioned the airdrop’s claims and how it was advertised on social media.

“The RSIC approach is new and unique, but there is absolutely no guarantee that this will be the first to run, and the team has no clue what the final protocol will look like.” wrote Jake Gallen, cryptocurrency podcaster and product manager at Emblem Vault. “Unless @rodarmor is actually behind this.”

Gallen, a core contributor to the BRC-20 platform Omnisat, like many others, can only guess who is behind Runecoin, saying that calling the airdropped inscriptions “runes” misrepresents the reality of what potential buyers are getting.

“This can do a lot of harm to new buyers who don’t know what they’re getting into when they purchase an inscription,” Gallen said. decryption In an interview. “Even though (the Rune Protocol) hasn’t been activated for another three months, they think it’s a rune.”

Gallen’s previous social media comments have been called “FUD,” but he emphasized the importance of transparency and providing all available public information to make informed decisions. He expressed concern about users engaging in activities without full knowledge and defended such uninformed behavior.

“You can call this FUD or whatever you want, but the fact is that the marketing behind this is not true,” Gallen continued. “Of course, this entire post can be disproven. However, if you are going to play this game, please do your own research on DYOR and make sure you understand the content in its entirety before trying to mimic it.”

“@rune_coin’s RSIC airdrop scheme is really neat and I hope airdrops to the Ordinals community become a trend, but this type of marketing needs to be emphasized,” tweeted Leonidas, an anonymous NFT historian and Ordinals collector.

Leonidas called this a red flag and warned that Ordinal enthusiasts should wait until the Rune protocol is released before jumping into projects using that name.

“It is certainly not the first rune on Bitcoin and Casey has stated several times that no rune is a rune until the protocol is actually deleted and the first rune token is actually created on chain,” Leonidas said. “I really hate it when RSIC markets itself in this way, especially because it misleads most ‘ordinary’ people in the Ordinals community who don’t take the time to fully understand why claims like this are blatantly false. do.”

Adding further confusion to the airdrop, the Runecoin Twitter account stated that the Rune protocol has not yet been released and no runes have been inscribed.

“We think this is a fun deployment mechanism that can be used for a variety of purposes, including runes, and we wanted to experiment and have fun with it. I hope you do too.” The Runecoin account said:

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.