The founders of Bioniq, a marketplace for Bitcoin-based collectibles, launched Odin.fun Thursday—aiming to reinvigorate a tepid Runes meme coin market by mirroring Solana’s immensely popular Pump.fun token launchpad. Letting users launch Bitcoin-based meme coins in a way that parallels the popular Solana app, Odin.fun was designed around speed, Bioniq CEO and co-founder Bob Bodily told Decrypt.
The platform features two-second transaction finality, according to a press release, ensuring that traders aren’t waiting around for meme coins to hit (or leave) their wallets.“Meme coins need to be traded at the speed of light,” Bodily said. “There’s something about the degen mentality where you have to be able to sell your position immediately because people overbuy crazy stuff, and as they’re watching the chart, they get anxious.”
Launched alongside Bitcoin’s so-called quadrennial halving by Casey Rodarmor last year, Runes are effectively Bitcoin-based meme coins. They come with technical quirks compared to meme coins issued on Solana or Ethereum, however, due to Bitcoin’s lack of smart contracts.
On the NFT marketplace Magic Eden, which began supporting Runes at launch, users must transact Runes in batches. Instead of being able to specify a specific quantity of Runes, a buyer, for example, would have to find a deal among a series of lots that sellers have listed. On top of that, Runes transactions are often constrained by Bitcoin’s block times, where a fresh set of validated transactions is added onto Bitcoin’s blockchain every 10 minutes.
