Crypto degens have a new – and, if all goes according to plan, faster, cheaper and safer – way to trade runes, the Bitcoin ecosystem’s answer to memecoins.
An automated market maker (AMM) for the Runes protocol is provided on Stacks. It is the first AMM for such tokens on this Bitcoin Layer 2 network. The AMM went live on Wednesday after introducing Stacks’ native BTC-backed asset sBTC on Tuesday.
The teams behind decentralized exchange (DEX) Bitflow Finance and Bitcoin Bridge Pontis have developed the AMM, a tool that facilitates trading through algorithmic means to improve liquidity. They announced the project on Wednesday.
The Runes Protocol is a standard for issuing fungible tokens on Bitcoin, building on the work of Ordinals that allowed data to be written onto small denominations of BTC, making each one unique and potentially valuable. Just as Ordinals could be seen as a means of creating the Bitcoin equivalent of NFTs, Runes could be seen as a place for the creation of memecoins.
Runes launched in April, coinciding with Bitcoin’s fourth halving, and generated a lot of buzz. In the 90 minutes following the halving, 78.6 BTC ($8.18 million) in fees were paid.
However, less than a month later, that excitement died down significantly, with fees dropping by more than 50%.
Bitflow’s aim with its AMM is to help Runes scale and address some of the shortcomings that hamper the company, such as: B. slow transaction speeds, high fees and sniping of pending transactions. In sniping, users exploit the time delay in which a transaction waits to be added to a Bitcoin block by removing it from the waiting room and then…
