It all starts from the inception of Bitcoin ecosystem.

The current Bitcoin Ecosystem dates back to the Ordinal Protocol created by @rodarmor at the end of 2022. (I don’t like the concept of “creator” because it connotates “a sense of control” which means he can have full control of the course and profit monopoly that goes against the vision of Bitcoin). In March, 2023, @domodata developed BRC-20 Inscriptions, of which $ORDI, $SATS and $RATS are the most prominent ones. They are popular as the BRC-20 explosion leads the Bitcoin ecosystem and onboards more with impressive growth. Though it had a widespread wealth effect, some inherent designs of BRC-20 lead to more limitations. For instance, as long as there are some hyped mints or activities, transactions and transfers would cause gigantic on-chain “dust”, which was more severe than the gas wars on Ethereum. Then Casey developed Runes Protocol in September, 2023. The advantages are fewer dusts, better user experience and more potentials like Lightening Integration. Casey determined that Runes Protocol launch at the moment of Bitcoin’s fourth halving, which is expected to be the 840,000th block on April 21, 2024.

Back to the euphoria phase of BRC-20 in December, 2023, the coming Runes Protocol was at hype fours months before its launch as users were impressed with generational wealth from BRC-20. It’s easy to believe that some fishy projects were preparing for scams. @LeonidasNFT, however, came to the battlefield as well. He is not for his own interest because he is a Bitcoin OG. Strictly speaking, though most in financial freedom have been playing dirty games, it cannot be denied that a small number of truly well-established souls also come from this group. Free of worries on their material lives, they have higher spiritual pursuits. Some of them often appear at critical moments, and their unintentional actions lead to a turning point in history. Unlike those teams who do everything for their own benefits, @LeonidasNFT Runes project is quite unique. He stated that he would airdrop a NFT called #Runestone to all addresses that meet certain requirements. All costs were free for users which were expected over 100k USDT based on fees at that time. Requirements were not that harsh either. At Block 826600 (January 2024, the first anniversary of Bitcoin Ordinals), users shall have at least 3 Bitcoin Oridinals. It was easy for early participants who explored Oridinals at the beginning. Even for users who were late to the game, there was a high probability that they will have 3 eligible Oridinals for airdrops. It shows that Leonidas intended to reward all early players who participated and built the Bitcoin ecosystem.

You can imagine that he worked hard to do such a project that everyone knows, not for personal gain, but to reward people who have contributed to the Bitcoin ecosystem, so as to encourage more people to participate in the future. It is a great way to show his integrity. The next question is when the airdrop actually happens, as Runestone are free, community was worried about the potential sell-off. After all, there are very few projects that do not bleed to death when they were free lunches. On March 15, 112,383 Runestones were airdropped to 112,383 addresses at one time, one for each address. Surprisingly, after a short-term drop, Runestone bounced back with huge buying pressure, and one was worth 1,500u , and broke the record in Ordinal transaction volume in the first 24 hours. I remember there were hundreds of BTC transaction volume every day in the first three trading days. In fact, many people have already come around. Although Runestone were airdrops like other projects, the market reaction was completely different. There were no dumps and even the community were ethusiatic about the pumping price.

My thesis is simple. The purpose of airdrops for most projects is for user contributions and market hypes, and ultimately the sale of a larger proportion of tokens by the teams. This Runestone airdrop by Leonidas is entirely for public interest. All are airdropped 100% to eligible addresses at the same time at a high cost of gas. All on-chain activities can be tracked. And anyone who was eligible, whether he owns 3 or 3k Ordinals, could only receive 1 Runestone to avoid unfair distribution from whales, and to cater to the interests of retail investors to the greatest extent. It is a historical moment and I believe that such a mass airdrop must have earned trust, which resulted in rush buys at free assets. At the same time, @LeonidasNFT‘s reaction to the short-lived sell-off on the first day was also quite generous. He accepted the fact that some did not insist on holding Runestone, and tweeted to express his understanding that they might need money to pay rent, loans, or other regularities, etc.

Interestingly, when #Runestone Floor Price skyrocketed, @CapCaptainteemo claimed @LeonidasNFT had many Runestones by inside allocations but he couldn’t back up his argument at all. After a short dump, everything went back to normal. In fact, for @LeonidasNFT, there was a much simpler way of insider allocations. There was no need to execute a 100% airdrop to over 110,000 addresses. And I’m also quite disgusted with this kind of fud that solely shitting over others. There are so many teams on other public chains such as Ethereum and Solana that are clearly bad actors and there are a sustantial amount of evidence. It is disgraceful to criticize @LeonidasNFT‘s distribution rather than accusing those bad actors. Fortunately, he did not fall into the trap. Later, someone checked the address and discovered that this fudder actually sold out his Runestones on the first day. It seemed that he was so depressed that he almost cried with laughter when he saw the pump.

Later, I clearly remembered that the markecap of Runestone surpassed @BoredApeYC, @Azuki, Puppets, @nodemonkes and other Top NFT collections within one month, and became the top 1 Bitcoin Ordinal and Top 2 NFT collection in the entire crypto space. But Runestone is not a real Rune. It is only equivalent to a “voucher” for the real Rune airdrop after April 21 in the future. There will be a snapshot in the future, and each Runestone can be airdropped to a certain number again just like the first time. Users don’t need to pay any gas. If they are hungry for more airdrops, they need to go to the secondary market to purchase more Runestones at high prices. This is also the reason why Runestone will be widely bought before the real Rune airdrop.

Then it came to April 24th. At this time, the basic rules of airdrop have been set up. The name is DOG·Go·TO·THE·MOON ($Dog for short). The total supply is 100 billion. Each Runestone can get 889,806 Dog, and if you hold n pieces, you will airdrop n times the amount of 889,806. All airdrops would be completed at once. After the airdrop, $DOG followed almost the same path as Runestone. The selloff started immediately. A well-known KOL who I do not want to disclose claimed that $DOG would had a spiral downtrend and fall into “Davis Double Kill”. However, I didn’t feel any panic at all this time because $DOG and Runestone are held by the same group of people. I’m convinced that $DOG has inherited the strong community consensus from Runestones. This is a group of users who were touched by the “Free & Fair” spirit preached by Leo, so I stated that the short-term sell-off would not affect expectations. To be honest, I even thought this sell-off was a bit too short-lived. In less than half an hour, the price of $DOG doubled from the bottom of 2.4 sats to 5 sats, and then the story of $DOG began.

The first CEX to list $DOG was @gate_io, and there was not much suspense about it. After listing, $DOG had its first small climax, rising to 0.0057u (9 sats, I will use USDT to denominate everything from now on) within two days, and then fell. The lowest price reached 0.0018u in Mid-May for half a month. I still not emotional about this because I learned two facts:

1. Western communities have always been optimistic about $DOG. I think this is largely related to he concept of “Free & Fair”.
2. The on-chain transaction volume is relatively small, and the positionsof CEX accounts for less than 3%, which means that most are diamond hands.

I didn’t expect it to come so soon! $DOG led Runes from May 15th to the next 20 days. It skyrocketed nearly 5x from the bottom. Other Runes also pumped sharply at different levels, while btc even fell slightly sideways. I am so happy that I can exchange for more BTC.

However, happiness is always so short-lived, and I did not sell at the top. Then $DOG experienced several consecutive months of decline starting from June 5 to August 5 when $DOG was as low as It fell below the previous low and reached 0.00175u. During this phase I was still observing the facts mentioned above, and I discovered:

1. The overall sentiment of Western communities has not changed much. Out of the recognition of Leo’s philosophy, most have become more determined and bullish.
2. The on-chain transaction volume is still far lower than that of CEX. At the same time, as more exchanges listed $DOG, the proportion of CEX’s positions slightly increased from 3% to less than 5%.
3. Excluding the exchanges, the top 100 holdings were in a continuous accumulation stage during the entire downtrend. Although the volume was not large, the lack of net outflow was really surprising to me.

This undoubtedly gave me more confidence because I did find that what really dominated the price is a very small amount of liquid tokens (less than 5%). This is just like Bitcoin, more than 90% of supply are not traded. In addition, liquidity is low. In other words, people are more optimistic about the long-term price of Bitcoin $DOG than the positions on the exchange.

At the same time, I also realized another short-term bearish indicator. Although Western communities of $DOG are optimistic about the “Free & Fair” concept with more diamond hands, the Chinese community really affects the price since most trading volume was at Gate, and the sentiment was quite low. In the absence of otherTier 1 CEX listings, this is very detrimental to the short-term price of $DOG.

In fact, I had another more important reason why I was short-term bearish about all tokens except Bitcoin. It’s deeply related to the crypto space and I need to elaborate:

As I have experienced the complete bull market cycle from 2019 to 2021, and compared with the status quo of the market, I have realized that crypto is becoming more and more dirty and unpopular. My reasons are as follows:

1. Teams are less willing to delve into technical innovations that are beneficial to crypto space, and instead are more willing to tell attractive narratives, and dump all to the community dubbed as Community Takeover.
2. New CEX Token listings tend to have low circulation rates, continuous unlocking, and high FDV (fully diluted marketcap). One doesn’t bother to speculate in such a high marketcap tokens.
3. Tier 1 CEXs will definitely list the so-called good projects, which I am also puzzled.

Everyone knows the schemes now. The tokens have been locked. Team will keep most and do marketing to attract VC institutions. I guess there may be a huge sum of money. The fees are given to exchanges with retail investors FOMO at high prices, and the team starts a new one. Sadly, I often see retail investors will applaund teams and VC institutions, as if they are the saviors.

Retail investors gradually realized that something was wrong since April and began to boycott VC-backed tokens. But then they were bombarded with on-chain memecoins. It is quite clear for memecoin cycle: find the hyped contracts and devs will deploy anyway at no cost; then he will deploy all possible tokens, add liquidity pools, and then immediately dump his positions at a negligible cost; Finally, you can wait for retail investors to buy higher. If you are lucky, you can drain the liquidity pool and make profits.

The above is just from a dev perspective. For retail investors, they need to spend a lot of time looking for hypes. After locating, they need to judge among uppercase and lowercase combinations on #Ethereum or #Solana respectively”, then you can trade and buy unfair allocations. You must ensure that the consensus by retail investors is high enough so that after the dump or drain, it will still have a chance to rise. At this point, even if it succeeds. . . It’s so difficult that I even think it’s better to invest in VC-backed tokens.

All reflect a severe problem, that is, there seems to be few real investment opportunities in the crypto space except Bitcoin. This has caused a visible decline in the quality of the entire space compared to that in the previous cycle. If all market participants don’t reverse the tide, the ultimate scenario will be: retail investors will not attract more funds to enter the market because there is no wealth effect, and existing retail funds will gradually be concentrated around VCs, exchanges. and on-chain dev. Eventually, the liquidity of retail investors is exhausted, and bad actors cash out and exit (they will definitely cash out, I can’t imagine that a shrewd liar will reinvest in another liar after defrauding the money, everyone is well aware of the space, which will eventually lead to demise of the space, leaving only one Bitcoin standing alone a value proposition. I was bearish based on the above theses and therefore I changed all cryptocurrencies to BTC on August 14th.

But mentality then took a turn for the worse, I gradually realized that @LeonidasNFT‘s airdrop might be a solution. Now $DOG‘s opportunities emerge. Now that crypto scams led by bad teamss, VCs, and on-chain devs is being disgusted by more and more people? Should we let the original artisit come back to us again? When Satoshi Nakamoto first created Bitcoin, he opened the gate for ordinary people to avoid being repeatedly manipulated by power and financial giants. In fact, the wealth effect of ordinary people and retail making money is the original intention, and it is also the purpose of almost all of us coming to the space. In the past cycles, $ETH has achieved this goal. There are many innovations and wealth effects. Teams are also very visionary and know how to benefit retail investors so that everyone has life-changing opportunities. The reason why the crypto space grew in the past was that many retail investors have made generational wealth. It was either spread to the bigger world through social media, or through people who made money. Only through word of mouth from relatives and friends can new blood flow in continuously. But now there are almost no retail investors that are capable of profits, which will only lead to a continued lack of liquidity and a vicious cycle.

The recipe to all is that the majority of retail investors should recognizing everything at the top of the pyramid is greedy and unsustainable. We must bravely say no to the projects disguised as Utility and the memecoins that are full of inside jobs by devs, and embrace the concept of “Free and Fair”. I’ve regained my $DOG position. Since the initial airdrop of Runestone, what @LeonidasNFT has been doing surprises me. He shows a different attitude, “altruistic” rather than “self-centered”. I dare not compare him with Satoshi Nakamoto, but I dare say that if his ideas were known to Satoshi Nakamoto, he would definitely be appreciated because though Satoshi Nakamoto has tons of BTC, he transferred all the profits to the users and miners who supported him in the early days, and he did not pocket any of them from beginning to end. It’s Leo’s hope that the initial 112,000+ addresses that received free Runestone would spread his simple message of “Free & Fair” and sticks to its original principles. I’m even convinced that Leonidas and Satoshi Nakamoto traveled back and forth for 15 years and reunited spiritually. Against the turbulent and precarious historical background of the entire cryptocurrency industry, @LeonidasNFT gave $DOG as a gift tagged with “Free & Fair”. To the 112,000 early users in Bitcoin ecosystem who still believe in the spirit and vision of Bitcoin, it’s his expectations that a new wave is coming to the space. $DOG does not dare to be in the league with Bitcoin, but $DOG is ambitous.

We design the slogan “Dog is People’s Bitcoin” to the space, hoping that all $DOG Army, no matter where you are from, what language you speak, or what beliefs you have, we have only one mission: the simple concept of “Free & Fair” will reshape the space and bring back the spirit of Bitcoin to all participants.