"Methane" is the hottest word in the Bitcoin ecosystem recently

As the first fair minted token of the new Bitcoin ecosystem protocol Alkanes, the market value of "METHANE" has exceeded 6 million US dollars

"Methane" is the hottest word in the Bitcoin ecosystem recently.

As the first fair minted token of the new Bitcoin ecosystem protocol Alkanes, the market value of "METHANE" has exceeded 6 million US dollars, which means that each METHANE is more than 60 US dollars. The editor asked some Bitcoin ecosystem players who participated in the minting, and the cost difference of minting is quite large. If the minting cost of 5 US dollars per piece is taken as the benchmark, then the profit of minting METHANE has exceeded 10 times.

How did the new asset protocol Alkanes come into being when the Bitcoin ecosystem has been deserted for a long time?

Background of the Agreement

The predecessor of the Alkanes protocol was called Protorunes, or "Programmable Runes", and the founders were the same. This thing also briefly attracted the attention of the Bitcoin ecosystem in the middle of last year, when runes were still quite popular.

The protocol founder @judoflexchop is the CTO of the Bitcoin wallet Oyl Wallet. This wallet may not have many users in the Bitcoin ecosystem, but it is still well-known. You can see why by looking at its financing situation:

On March 8, 2024, Bitcoin infrastructure company Oyl completed a $3 million Pre-Seed round of financing, led by Arca, with participation from Foresight Ventures, Arthur Hayes family office Maelstrom, Domo, UTXO Management, Taproot Wizards CEO Udi Werthheimer, Kanosei and FlamingoDAO.

Because of Arthur Hayes' participation, this wallet quickly gained popularity in the Bitcoin ecosystem. In the middle of last year, Oyl launched a Bitcoin NFT project called "Airheads", which caused controversy due to its relatively high minting price. From the perspective of NFT price performance, this is a "failed" project, but recently it has risen by nearly 3 times due to the popularity of the Alkanes protocol.

Although they are all wallets, in the Bitcoin ecosystem, the major wallets are not just wallets. For example, OKX, UniSat, Magic Eden, and the protagonist of this article, Oyl, have many other Bitcoin ecosystem businesses besides wallets. Only Xverse's business scope is relatively "focused". Back to Oyl, in addition to wallets, they also made a Bitcoin RPC called "Sandshrew" and the Alkanes protocol.

Now Oyl is pushing this protocol with all its strength, and the official Twitter account also includes Alkanes:

Reasons for the explosion

Alkanes is a new Bitcoin asset protocol. In general, it borrows from the Rune Protocol's "Runestone" structure, but is more scalable and supports smart contracts. As mentioned earlier, the protocol's predecessor was Protorunes. From the name, Protorunes looks like a "magic version of Rune", but it is not. In short, the Rune Protocol and the "Runestone" structure are like closed iOS, while Protorunes and Alkanes are like open source Android.

Protorunes is equivalent to the "Runestone" of the Rune Protocol. The "Runestone" here is not the NFT with a strong wealth-creating effect in the early days of Rune, but the "transaction data package" of Rune. In simple terms, it is a piece of information embedded in a Bitcoin transaction, which is the basis for the index to determine whether there is a Rune operation in a transaction.

If the indexer finds the "RUNES" mark when scanning the OP_RETURN of each transaction, it will parse the data after the mark, such as etching, casting, transfer, etc. "Runestone" is like an operating guide, and the indexer obtains the index result based on the guide.

"Runestone" is an operation guide limited to the Rune Protocol. It corresponds to the Rune Protocol in a single line, but Protorunes is different. To put it bluntly, we cannot directly let the Rune Protocol indexer implement such an action, "I am a sub-asset protocol based on Runestone, please index me together", but Protorunes can. Everyone can customize a new asset protocol according to the Protorunes data format. These protocols will be assigned a "Protocol ID". The indexer will read the "Protocol ID" to determine which protocol specification to parse according to.

There are some modular chains like Ethereum that make things easier. For developers, they can just use the tools provided by Oyl and don’t need to make their own indexer.

As for the level of smart contract implementation, before the revival of OP_CAT, the basic approach is to store contract data in transactions and execute indexes off-chain, and there can be no deviation from this approach.

In addition to the technical aspects, there are two main reasons why this protocol can gain momentum. First, it has received