TechFlow news: Ordinals founder Casey Rodarmor has released the Runes documentation on X. Runes enables Bitcoin transactions to etch, mint, and transfer Bitcoin-native digital assets.
Runes protocol messages are called Runestones and are stored within Bitcoin transaction outputs. A single transaction may contain at most one Runestone. Runestones can etch a new rune, mint an existing rune, and transfer runes from transaction inputs to outputs. Transaction outputs can carry any number of rune balances.
Runestones may be malformed for various reasons; such malformed Runestones are known as cenotaphs. When runes are sent into a transaction containing a cenotaph, those runes are destroyed. Minting within a transaction containing a cenotaph counts toward the minting limit, but the minted runes are burned.
Cenotaphs serve as a upgrade mechanism, allowing runes to be assigned new semantics—changing how runes are created and transferred—without misleading unupgraded clients about the location of runes, since unupgraded clients will perceive these runes as having been destroyed.
