$EPIC will be airdropped today, here is a review of its past and present (including Blob introduction)

Original title: "The past and present of the epic rune $EPIC (including Blob introduction)"

Original source: Portal_Kay, Runes Chinese Community

 

$EPIC is an epic rune, which is very low-key and few people know about it.

 

This article will give you a complete introduction to the past and present of $EPIC, including the team behind it and the Blob project.

 

 

The past and present of $EPIC

 

1. Basic information about $EPIC

 

$EPIC refers to the rune No. 66,429 EPIC•EPIC•EPIC•EPIC, which is deployed by the Blob team. A total of 1 billion tokens will be issued, with 500 tokens in a single rune.

 

Blob Introduction: https://x.com/portal_kay/status/1777623582887313885

 

5% of the Fair Mint was opened in the afternoon of the deployment day. Mint was very popular at the time, and the average cost of a single $EPIC should be above 30U.

 

The remaining 95% is officially pre-mined, and the distribution details have not yet been announced. According to community rumors: Blob NFT holders will receive most of the airdrop shares, and the remaining part will be allocated to some blue-chip NFT communities (such as Ordinal Maxi Biz).

 

 

2. Why is $EPIC called an epic rune?

 

Block 840,000, which was created on April 20, is the first block created after the fourth Bitcoin halving. This block was mined by the mining pool ViaBTC. According to the Ordinals theory, the first Satoshi mined from the halving block will be given an Epic rarity (see the figure below for each rarity level). Since Bitcoin will only undergo 32 halvings in total, there will only be 32 Epic rarity Satoshis at most, and there are only 4 in existence. And this "Epic Satoshi" is also the first Satoshi mined in the Genesis Block of the Runes Protocol, which gives it special significance.

 

 

ViaBTC then held an auction of EPIC rare satoshis at the end of April. At that time, the Blob team was in charge of XTB, and finally won the epic satoshi at a price of 33.3 BTC! Afterwards, the two founders of Blob, Nuro and Eloc, engraved a generative art work on this rare satoshi: the inscription #70634325. And this cool generative front-end animation became the mother of the $EPIC rune. The Blob team etched the EPIC•EPIC•EPIC•EPIC rune with this inscription as the parent inscription, which is the origin of $EPIC being called the "epic rune". Another small easter egg shows the geeky romance of the Blob team vividly: in order to pay tribute to Bitcoin pioneer Hal Finney (born on May 4, 1956), the Blob team deliberately chose to etch $EPIC on May 4.

 

#70634325 Inscription: https://geniidata.com/ordinals/inscription/7d0a2dd897222913d58fc957b0429526117a0a61c964642fe93b077f328ccec1i0

 

3. $EPIC follow-up, the first recursive rune?

 

Two weeks ago, Eloc, the technical leader of Blob, submitted a PR (code merge request) to the Ordinals project, which is the basis for supporting "recursive runes". Eloc's idea is to add a "recursive endpoint" so that developers can know the number of corresponding runes and whether there are other inscriptions from the transaction output, so that the inscription can change according to the number of runes.

 

Currently, this code update has not been reviewed and approved by the Runes protocol party (Casey and Raph). If it is approved, $EPIC will most likely become the first rune project that can be linked to the inscription effect, that is, the first "recursive rune". Imagine it simply: for example, when the number of $EPIC runes exceeds a certain number, the Blob in the same UTXO switches to a more sci-fi background (the default background is pure black). In the final implementation, I believe that the Blob team will definitely be able to produce an effect that exceeds our expectations (they have always been like this).

 

 

Blob Project Introduction

 

1. What is Blob?

 

In the computer field, Blob actually refers to "Binary Large Object", which is a type of storage for large volumes of data, such as videos, pictures, etc. From the name, we can also see how strong the technical geek flavor behind Blob is. However, Dr. Jin Gou gave Blob a new interpretation: ₿itcoiners LOve ₿itcoiners, this interpretation will have a lot of love.

 

The popular Blob is an NFT based on the Ordinals protocol. It looks like a cool animation, and the iconic element is that each NFT will have a pair of "exploding eyes". But in fact, Blob is not a video or a picture in any format, but a web-side special effect completely implemented with JS code. In addition, the complex technology used by Blob and the display effect achieved have been explained in the two analysis articles listed above.

 

2. Creative team

 

Blob's creators Eloc and Nuro are two core members of Ordinals. Both creators come from the same organization, cypherpunklab. Cypherpunk Lab is a punk community of Coding + Art, which brings together a group of programmers, scientists, and artists, with life, love, joy and innovation as core values. Seeing this, everyone should understand why Blob's logo is such an exploding eye, just to express the punk spirit.

 

Among them, Eloc is the fifth-ranked core code contributor of Ordinals, and Nuro comes from Casey's team. It is precisely because of the technical background of the two creators and their love for punk culture that the overall tone and production route of Blob have been laid.

 

3. Project Origin

 

As for why a project like Blob is released, Eloc explained in a tweet. In the past year, both creators have devoted a lot of effort to the Ordinals protocol. They have always hoped to use the technology integrated in the Ordinals protocol to create a set of generative NFT collections. And Blob (binary large object) is a very good carrier for this collection, which can show the artistic effects generated using the latest technology of Ordinals.

 

Eloc tweets:

https://x.com/Elocremarc/status/1773230178636095518

 

Finally, the creators combined technology and art to successfully create the Blob collection, and gave it back to the Ordinals community through airdrops.

 

4. Why is Blob so popular?

 

Since Blob was listed on the MagicEden collection on April 6, the floor price has soared from 0.005 BTC to a maximum of 0.04 BTC. It can be said that it has been greatly sought after by crypto users. And this time, crypto enthusiasts from the East and the West are together for fomo. So why is it so popular? Here is some basic analysis:

 

The project was created by Ordinals OG

 

As mentioned in Part 1, Blob was created by two core members of Ordinals. It is precisely because of this background that Blob has such influence and can call on various crypto KOLs to help promote it together, making the entire Twitter screen full of posts.

 

Exquisite details and the most advanced Ordinals technology

 

Through the technical analysis mentioned above, we can see the thinking behind the two creators and the efforts they made for Blob. From the almost showy engraving technology, to the rich style changes (each Blob is unique), to the fact that all the satoshis used for issuance start with blob and the sub-inscription ID starts with b10b, this series of details makes Blob an excellent collection of technology + art.

 

Strong punk meme attributes

 

Not only is it a technical foundation, the choice of this iconic element also naturally has a strong meme propagation attribute. This element is highly adaptable, and it has triggered a large number of users to create secondary works as soon as it appeared. Almost every original picture with this pair of exploding eyes can produce a unique effect. People use various celebrity photos, popular NFTs, and meme pictures to recreate. I also used Rodin's famous sculpture "The Thinker" to do a secondary creation, which is really magical.

 

 

5. Possible subsequent development

 

Technically, there is room for upgrades. According to Li Li's technical interpretation, there is currently room for upgrades in the Blob settings. You only need to re-engraving a new inscription on one of the referenced satoshis to update the logic of the Blob style display, and even add new elements and animations to achieve a collective upgrade of all inscriptions in the collection.

 

References:

1. SUN XIAOCHUAN "EPIC Epic Cong Auction Details": https://x.com/sun_xinjin/status/1784243821917921304

2. c00k1e "Recursive Rune" is coming? 》：https://www.theblockbeats.info/news/532333、Eloc《Recursive Runes Endpoint Output》：https://github.com/ordinals/ord/pull/3654

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