Early this morning, @Elocremarc , co-founder of the Bitcoin NFT project Blob and the sixth-ranked contributor to the Ordinals protocol, posted a tweet:
Its time, recursive rune!
When I wrote this article, the floor price of Blob had risen by 30% and exceeded 0.04 Bitcoin.
So, we know recursion and we also know rune, but what is recursive rune?
Make the inscriptions move with the runes
Everyone should be familiar with the role of recursion. On-chain pointer allows inscriptions to reference data on the Bitcoin chain, including data from other inscriptions. The following data are supported for reference, including the latest block height, specified block height, data from other inscriptions, etc. These are also called recursive endpoints.
@Elocremarcs idea is to add a recursive endpoint, namely /r/output. As long as the recursive endpoint /r/output is added, developers will be able to know the number of corresponding runes and whether there are other inscriptions from the transaction output, which will enable the inscription to change according to the number of runes.
According to my current understanding, this requires keeping the corresponding inscriptions and runes in one UTXO (otherwise, when the balance of the rune changes, it is impossible to obtain the balance change of the rune from the transaction output to change the inscription image accordingly). From this point of view, we can first look forward to the emergence of this kind of gameplay, for example, etching an inscription while also burning a small picture, and the small picture obtained will be different depending on the number of corresponding runes.
Deeper gameplay, such as the Bitcoin full-chain game mentioned by Pizza Ninjas CEO @TO (for example, one NFT is equal to a game account, runes are game coins, and the game coin balance can be read directly on the NFT), may require further support from infrastructure.
Finally, I would like to mention that the addition of the recursive endpoint /r/output is a prerequisite for @Elocremarcs solution. At present, @Elocremarc has submitted a PR on the official Github of Ordinals. If it is successfully passed, we will have recursive runes to play with.
Conclusion
Runes have been an absolute hot topic in the crypto market over the past week, but despite the high level of attention, they have not shown a good money-making effect. In addition to the projects pre-mined runes and the fair casting that BRC-20 has played before, Runes may need more gameplay to stimulate it. If recursive runes can be quickly implemented, it will undoubtedly give Runes a shot in the arm.
