Early this morning, the co-founder of the Bitcoin NFT project Blob and the current 6th-ranked contributor to the Ordinals protocol, @Elocremarc, posted the following tweet:

"The time has come, recursive runes!"

By the time this article was written, the floor price of Blob had surged by 30%, breaking through 0.04 Bitcoin.

So, we know what "recursive" means, and we know what "runes" are, but what exactly is "recursive runes"?

Making Inscriptions Move Along with Runes

Everyone should have some understanding of the role of "recursive"—it acts as an "on-chain pointer," allowing inscriptions to reference data on the Bitcoin blockchain, including data from other inscriptions. The supported reference data includes the latest block height, specified block heights, data from other inscriptions, etc., which are also referred to as "recursive endpoints."

@Elocremarc proposed the idea of adding a "recursive endpoint," namely "/r/output." Once this endpoint is added, developers will be able to determine the quantity of corresponding runes and whether there are other inscriptions from the transaction output, enabling inscriptions to change based on the quantity of runes.

Based on the current understanding, this requires keeping the corresponding inscriptions and runes in the same UTXO (otherwise, when the balance of runes changes, the inscription image cannot be updated accordingly by retrieving the balance change from the transaction output). From this perspective, we can look forward to new gameplay, such as etching an inscription while also engraving a small image, where the resulting image varies depending on the amount of runes minted.

Deeper gameplay, such as the Bitcoin full-chain game mentioned by Pizza Ninjas CEO @TO (e.g., an NFT serving as a game account, runes as in-game currency, with the ability to directly read the game currency balance on the NFT), may require further infrastructure support.

Finally, it’s worth reiterating that adding the "/r/output" recursive endpoint is a prerequisite for @Elocremarc's proposal. Currently, @Elocremarc has submitted a PR on the official Ordinals GitHub. If it passes smoothly, we’ll have "recursive runes" to play with.

Conclusion

"Runes" have been the absolute hotspot in the crypto market over the past week, but despite the high attention, they haven’t shown strong profit potential. Beyond project teams’ "pre-mined runes" and the "fair minting" reminiscent of BRC-20, "runes" may need more gameplay to stimulate interest. If "recursive runes" can be implemented quickly, it would undoubtedly give "runes" a significant boost.