On Saturday, January 25, the developer of the Runes protocol launched a new memecoin on Solana called Runes.
After a debut with a bang on the DEX Raydium, the Twitter account of Runetoshi was suspended, and the price of the memecoin crashed.
Runes on Bitcoin
Runes is a protocol launched in April, during the Bitcoin halving.
Thanks to this protocol, the possibility of creating fungible tokens on the Bitcoin blockchain has been added.
Bitcoin in fact was not only not created to generate other tokens, but it is also completely lacking native functionalities that allow it to do so.
Runes therefore adds this functionality to the original Bitcoin protocol, but after an initial bull moment it does not seem to have had great success.
In fact, according to the data reported on Dune, it has been months since transactions related to Runes on the Bitcoin blockchain have collapsed to become an almost negligible number.
If at first they had exploded, almost completely supplanting those linked to the BRC-20 format, now it is the latter that has returned to being dominant.
In other terms, it is possible to state that the Runes protocol on Bitcoin has gone out of fashion.
Runes: the memecoin on Solana
The protocol Runes on Bitcoin was launched by the developer Runetoshi.
The very strong decline in the use of this protocol in recent months could also be due precisely to the boom that has instead occurred in the use of Solana to create and launch new fungible tokens.
Thanks especially to initiatives like pump.fun, the minting of new tokens on Solana has exploded, leaving only crumbs from this point of view to blockchains like that of Bitcoin.
On the other hand, creating and launching a token on Solana is easy and very economical, while doing it on Bitcoin using Runes is not accessible to everyone, and especially the fees on transactions are much higher.
It might be the boom of minting new tokens on Solana that convinced Runetoshi to launch a Runes token on Solana.
Technically, however, it is just a memecoin, because in fact it has no direct relationship with the Runes protocol on Bitcoin.
Pump&dump of the memecoin on Solana Runes
The memecoin Runes on Solana was launched on Saturday, January 25th. Subsequently, it was put up for sale on the DEX Raydium, also based on this blockchain.
Initially, its price was just over 0.1 thousandths of a dollar, but this is quite common for memecoins launched in this way.
Within just an hour from the launch on the DEX, the price had already risen to almost 8 thousandths of a dollar, and it’s probably from here that it makes sense to start doing the analyses.
The maximum price was reached two hours after the launch, even at almost 27 thousandths of a dollar.
Five hours after the launch, however, it started to collapse.
In just three hours, it had already lost all the gains recorded after the first hour, and in less than 24 hours from the launch, the price had dropped to 0.7 thousandths of a dollar.
Since then, not only has it not recovered, but it has ended up falling even below 0.4 thousandths.
Seen this way, this trend would seem to all intents and purposes a classic pump&dump.
The problems of Runetoshi
Runetoshi has informed about the launch of this new memecoin on his personal X profile.
Subsequently, that same profile of his was suspended by X for violating the platform’s rules. As of today, it has not yet been reactivated.
Although the causes that led to the suspension are not precisely known, it is possible that they have to do precisely with the launch and explicit advertising of the memecoin.
There are even those who accuse him of having “stolen” money with this pump&dump.
It is not clear, however, if the price dump of Runes is due to the suspension of Runetoshi’s X profile, or if it is due to massive sales triggered by someone on Raydium.
Note that upon reaching the maximum price peak, the market capitalization of this memecoin had risen to about 28 million dollars, while then it collapsed below 400,000$.
For now, those against Runetoshi are only unconfirmed accusations, but the pump&dump is evident. It remains to be seen whether behind the pump&dump there is really Runetoshi, or if it is a normal market dynamic due to the reaction to the bad news of the suspension of his X profile.
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