Create your own Bitcoin Rune

Learn how to "etch" and "mint" Bitcoin Runes

TLDR:

• Creating a Rune is called “Etching”. The specific keywords for etching are shown in this post. One of them is “premine” that premints a number of tokens to you.

• Etching Runes can be done easily with Luminex’s tools removing all the technical complexity involved, although etching can be pretty expensive.

• Minting Runes can also be done easily with Luminex, and you can mint either your own Rune or any other Runes that are not fully minted, plus it’s cheap.

• Runes are still in their infancy, but as the Bitcoin ecosystem continues to grow they could become the de-facto fungible token standard on Bitcoin.

Usually I release these posts every Thursday but yesterday we soft launched a new DeFi app we’re working on called venki.xyz where you can bet on the price of Bitcoin and win up to 1 BTC in prizes. So this week my post got delayed to Friday.

In last week’s post we looked at Bitcoin Runes and specifically what they are and how to buy them.

This week we’ll go one step further and create our own Rune, which in Runes language is called “etching”, and then “mint” this Rune and view other runes.

Creating Runes

If you don’t yet know what a Bitcoin Rune is then read my last week’s post which explains what they are and how to buy them. Today we’re essentially following on from last week by creating and minting our own Runes.

As a brief reminder though, just for full context in this post, Bitcoin Runes are a brand new fungible token protocol that was released on Bitcoin on the halving block 840,000 a couple of weeks ago by the same creator of Bitcoin Ordinals, Casey Rodamor.

Lots of Runes have already been created in the short amount of time that it’s been out, and creating a Rune in it’s own terminology is called “etching” similar to how creating an Ordinal is called “inscribing”.

While Ordinals are “inscribed” to individual satoshis, Runes are “etched” into the blockchain and stored in UTXOs. This means UTXOs can carry around a Bitcoin balance and an additional Runes balance.

Etching a Rune is defined with a few keywords as shown above, that behave as follows:

• Divisibility - By default this is 0, but a Rune can have up to 38 decimal places.

• Premine - Allocates a number of tokens to the creator from the start.

• Rune - The token’s name, it can be a maximum of 28 characters and a minimum of 13, with that minimum reducing every 4 months by 1 character.

• Spacers - Defines the position of spaces that appear in a Rune’s name to separate it, eg. DOG-GO-TO-THE-MOON has 5 spaces.

• Symbol - A currency symbol for the token, by default it’s ¤ but this can be set to anything from a $ to an emoji like 🚀.

• Terms - Includes variables like a cap on the number of tokens per mint, the total number of tokens mintable, and block heights for starting and ending the mint.

Runes have this curious functionality where they can be etched by a creator, and then partially premined with the “premine” keyword, yet afterwards any individual on the Bitcoin network can mint a chunk of the total number of Runes themselves.

This is an interesting mechanic that Runes has that was inspired by BRC20s, and means that not only can we etch our own runes, but we can then also then mint either our own or other people’s Runes too! Below we’ll look at how to do each of these.

Etching

Creating a Rune, ie. “etching”, can be done with some neat tools already so you don’t need to get very technical at all.

Luminex is probably the best I’ve come across as of now. When you open it up and click on the “Mint Runes” option at the top and you’ll see the following:

On the right hand side there’s the option to “Etch” a Rune, that has a simplified interface that maps to the previous keywords above. The fields here are:

• Rune Ticker - Full name including the spacers that are input as dots, so you can do DOG.GO.TO.THE.MOON (take note that names must be unique).

• Decimals - Equivalent to “Divisibility” above, ie. the number of decimal places.

• Symbol - As above, the symbol for the token, anything from ¤, to $, to 🚀.

• Max Supply - Total amount of tokens available, eg. 21m in Bitcoin

• Limit Per Mint - The number of tokens that can be minted per indiviual mint.

• Logo - An image to associate with the token.

There’s also couple of boxes at the bottom “Reserve Supply” and “Block Limit” that open up more options:

• Allocation to reserve - Equivalent to “Premine” keyword, that premints for you.

• Starting block number + Ending block number - both mark when the mint starts and ends, only between these blocks can these tokens be minted.

There’s also a little box called “Turbo” that Casey has explained will make you opt-in to any of the future features he plans to do, which are yet unannounced.

To etch your own Rune just fill in the fields as you’d like to and then submit. I went with the following settings for a Rune based around myself “afoxinweb3”.

I essentially tokenised myself on Runes, with a 1bn token supply and 10% of them premined for myself. Plus I set the minting to end on block 950,000, which is around a couple of years away, after which no more Runes will be mintable.

I used the Xverse wallet to perform the transaction, and selected the “fast” option, which cost me 0.0019 BTC (around $115). This is pretty expensive, but all operations on Bitcoin are generally expensive.

Bitcoin block times can be slow and even with the “Fast” option it took 1 hour for the full 6 blocks needed for the Rune to be “etched”.

The result was visible as such with the new A-FOX-IN-WEB-THREE Rune showing up in my “Owned Runes” section at the bottom of the Luminex page.

Minting

Having now “etched” your rune you can go and mint more of it. Since I had only premined 10% of my Rune’s supply there was still 90% of the total supply available, that I or anyone else could mint.

Luminex is a great tool for this too, making it super simple to find and mint Runes that aren’t yet fully minted. For example, by searching at the bar at the top you can find A-FOX-IN-WEB-THREE and select the mint button on the right hand side.

There’s a slider to control how many mints you want to do. In this case I did 1 mint that was another 100m tokens as I’d set the token’s “limit per mint” when “etching”.

The transaction to mint was a lot cheaper and quicker than etching. It cost me only around $5 to mint, in comparison the the previous $115 to etch.

In this case my mint size was 10% of the tokens, the same as my premine allocation, so you can see that after the mint was completed, I now held a total of 200,000,000 of the tokens, which is 20% of the total possible supply:

Luminex goes one step further in allowing you to get a really detailed overview of a token if you click on it’s name. For example, by selecting the SATOSHI-NAKAMOTO token, which is one of the more popular Runes already out there, you get this:

This overview is really great as it shows the circulating supply, the number of holders, when it was deployed, the premine, transfers, and all sorts of other details. It’s a great view into a Rune that can help you decide whether you want to mint or buy it.

Still Early

A little over 1 year ago I made a post on Bitcoin Ordinals but didn’t pay much attention to the Ordinals space afterwards and missed some pretty big mints that came out later including the likes of Ordinals Maxi Business (OMBs), of which some are already going for over 2 BTC.

While Runes is literally in it’s infancy and Bitcoin is expensive and slow to use, I personally feel like now is one of the best times to get involved. Bitcoin is the mother of all blockchains and there are a lot of wealthy Bitcoiners out there.

If you have time, a little bit of money, and patience, then pay some attention to Bitcoin Runes and in fact the entire Bitcoin space, and you may just strike gold.

It really feels like Ordinals kicked off a sort of “Bitcoin Renaissance” with a lot of funding going into developers building on top of Bitcoin, which is something we’d seen mainly on other chains like Ethereum up to now.

My guess is in the coming years we will see Bitcoin have its own L2s, dApps and growing ecosystem, which all these assets like Ordinals and Runes will traverse over. So now’s as good a time as ever to get involved in this burgeoning space.