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Kraken is now live with $DOG
The history and architecture behind Runestone and $DOG is one of the most principled experiments we’ve seen on Bitcoin, and it deserves to be properly understood.
On January 22, 2024, @LeonidasNFT proposed a fully open-source airdrop for the Ordinals community. The plan: no team share, no insiders, no misleading marketing, and only volunteer contributors. The goal was to reward 100,000 of the most active Ordinals users based purely on on-chain activity, capped at one per address. This was designed to prevent whales from dominating the supply and to encourage true decentralization.
By January 25, the Runestone concept was introduced. Its mission was to create a transparent, fair, and decentralized reward mechanism for those who helped build the Ordinals ecosystem in its earliest days. Snapshot block 826,600 was chosen to mark the one-year anniversary of Ordinals going live. The airdrop mechanics and eligibility criteria were discussed publicly and transparently in Discord.
On January 27, Bitcoin engineers were called upon to help compile a list of eligible addresses. To qualify, an address needed to have at least three inscriptions. All plain text and application/json files were excluded. The process was independently verified and the full eligibility list was published openly for community review.
On March 3, @LeonidasNFT announced the Runestone inscription itself, designed by artist @cl_art_studio, as the largest Bitcoin inscription ever, at 3.97 MB. It also became the largest Bitcoin block in history, pushing the limits of what’s possible in Bitcoin’s base layer.
On March 8, a single Runestone was sold at auction for 8 BTC ($544,713). All proceeds went to cover network fees for the upcoming Runestone airdrop. Nothing was taken by the team (there was no team).
On March 16, the Free and Fair airdrop was executed. 112,383 Runestones were distributed 1:1 to the eligible addresses. No preferential treatment. No allocations to insiders. Just a massive, historic on-chain giveaway.
On April 6, Leonidas introduced $DOG, the first memecoin to be natively built on the Runestone foundation. DOG was designed to be a cultural wedge, a fun, friendly onramp to help millions of new users discover and engage with Bitcoin. But this wasn’t just a meme, it was a cultural statement.
On April 20, at Bitcoin block 840,000, Casey Rodarmor’s Runes Protocol went live. For the first time, Bitcoin had an ultra efficient, UTXO native way to issue fungible tokens. DOG was one of the first Runes to be etched, marking a turning point for tokenization on Bitcoin. $DOG was etched as Rune #3 in a 1,258,757 sat/vB transaction, the 5th most expensive Bitcoin transaction in history.
And on April 24, 100 billion $DOG tokens were distributed evenly to over 75,000 holders of Runestone Ordinal NFTs. That’s 889,806 $DOG per eligible wallet. There was no ICO. No token sale. No listing fee. Just a pure community airdrop with 100% of the supply circulating from day one.
On June 4, $DOG hit a $980 million market cap without any Tier-1 centralized exchange listings. It became the largest memecoin on Bitcoin and a definitive proof point for what is possible when a project is built with fairness, transparency, and decentralization at its core.
[Important to read] To the community: I want to sincerely apologize for not articulating this earlier.
There’s been confusion about $DOG’s origins and structure, and that’s on me. The truth is, $DOG represents one of the most authentic, community-driven launches in Bitcoin history. It's not just another token; it’s a statement about what Bitcoin can support when innovation meets principle.
And today, I’m proud to share that $DOG is now listed on Kraken. We believe in supporting real, grassroots innovation. No insiders. No shortcuts. Just real usage and real community. $DOG is Bitcoin by design.
More to come.
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