By the BTC Terminal Team

In April 2024, when Casey Rodarmor dropped the Runes protocol on Bitcoin, we at BTC Terminal were already deep in the trenches building on Ordinals. When Runes hit, it felt like lightning — Bitcoin finally had a native, trustless token standard. No more off-chain JSON hacks. No more kludgy wrappers. Just pure Bitcoin-native token minting.

So we launched BTC Terminal.

Our mission was to build Infrastructure for Runes — a place where traders, devs, and degens could track, launch, mint, watch whales, and stay ahead of meta shifts. We were early, fast, and loud. And in Q2 2024, the energy was insane. 

In August 2025, we have to be real: The Runes ecosystem is a shadow of what it was.

Here’s our honest take — from the inside.

Let’s not forget the fundamentals:

• Runes were simple. You could mint straight from your wallet, with no bridge, no contract, no external dependencies.
  
  
• They were pure Bitcoin. Built on the UTXO model, with no need for Taproot or exotic opcodes.
  
  
• They brought life to the chain. For a brief moment, Bitcoin wasn’t just a vault — it was alive with experimentation again.
  
  

We watched tens of thousands of wallets flood in, sometimes in a single weekend. Projects like Runestone, RunePunks, RuneFi, and of course ORDI led the charge. Volume was up. Indexers were stressed. Twitter was flooded.

But here’s the part most people don’t want to say out loud:

Most of it was just noise.

• 95% of tokens had no roadmap, no devs, no utility.
  
  
• Airdrops were gamed. Bots farmed mint windows.
  
  
• Liquidity dried up almost as fast as it came in.
  
  
• And worst of all: nothing meaningful got built beyond speculation.
  
  

The Runes protocol did its job — it gave us a canvas. But we, as a space, mostly just sprayed graffiti. And by Q4 2024, the cracks were visible.

Even now, in mid-2025, we track fewer than 100 active Runes tokens with any meaningful on-chain volume. Builders moved back to EVMs. Traders moved back to Solana. The “BTC DeFi” narrative evaporated.

We still believe in Runes as a tech. But as a movement? It needs to reboot.

We built BTC Terminal originally around Ordinals data. Back then, JPEGs and meme art were flooding the chain. Taproot Wizards. Bitcoin Frogs. Rune-generated AI graffiti. You name it.

Ordinals are still alive, but the market is quieter — and that’s a good thing.

The hype phase is over. Now we’re seeing:

• Real artists experimenting with permanence and censorship-resistance
  
  
• Tooling maturing: wallets, marketplaces, no-code inscribers
  
  
• Use cases around timestamping, legal docs, identity
  
  

Ordinals may never reach OpenSea volumes — and that’s fine. The point was never to “flip JPEGs” better than Ethereum. The point was to do something different — and permanent.

ORDI is still the ticker everyone watches.

If BTC rips, ORDI rips harder. If BTC stalls, ORDI dumps harder. It's the beta-leveraged tracker for Bitcoin-native speculative sentiment.

In many ways, it’s become the Fear & Greed Index of the Runes ecosystem.

Right now, ORDI sits in a sort of purgatory — a top-300 coin with volume, but no clear direction. It’s a mirror. It reflects us. Still active, but not sure what comes next.

Here’s what we’re still excited about:

• BIP-119 & BitVM: Bringing more programmability to Bitcoin without breaking its principles
  
  
• Cross-chain indexing: Making BTC Terminal a portal into Solana, EVMs, and Layer 2s — not just BTC
  
  
• Covenants & vault logic: Real on-chain logic without smart contracts
  
  
• Collective memory: Using Ordinals to preserve more than just memes — think cultural assets, open science, public data
  
  

We think the next great Bitcoin application won’t be about price action or mint hype. It’ll be quiet. Infrastructure. Data. Proofs.

And we’re still here for that.

We still believe in what we’re building — and what this space can become. But we’ve had to unlearn a few things since 2024.

We’re not chasing hype anymore. We’re chasing truth.

If you’re still building on Bitcoin, if you still believe in a future where culture and code can coexist on the hardest chain in the world — we see you.

We're still here.

And we’re still building.

— BTC Terminal Team