What Do You Know About NodeRocks?

It feels good to be writing today, its been far too long. You see, I just haven’t had the bandwidth for this cherished hobby of mine, and the subject of today’s article is the reason why. By the time you get to the end, it is my sincere hope that you understand why this Bitcoin ordinals collection is so important to me.

The Story Begins

On an early January morning in 2024 I started the day as I always do: I checked the Honey Badgers Discord for alpha. My degen family was going pretty hard at this mint on Ordzaar, the art was cool, the price was right, and I did what any good degen would do. I minted this fella:

I really dug the art, so I joined the Discord, and then started my daily grind. As I went through my day I would periodically check the Discord, and the first red flag became apparent: The dev was nowhere to be found for hours at a time. The collection minted out, and everyone was stressed about having the collection fully indexed before the impending Jubilee update. You see the NodeRocks are a cursed ordinals collection, and the Jubilee update would mark the official end of cursed ordinals; and by the way…it was less than 24 hours away.

Now, at the time I did not know as much about cursed ordinals as I do now, but I did know that having a partially indexed collection would be a disaster. Everyone was sweating, but the Ordzaar team is awesome and assured us that we would make the deadline. As for the dev? Still AWOL.

By the next day, a familiar energy was palpable in the Discord. If you have ever been a part of a collection/token that rugged you know exactly what I am talking about. The FUD was heavy, the price was bottoming out, and lots of dude’s panties were in a twist. None of that really bothered me at this point, and I took advantage of the discounted prices and grabbed a few more NodeRocks and went about my day.

I didn’t return to the Discord until the 3rd day, and found it to be far less hectic and panicked. Instead there were a handful of other members who were talking sense, and I remember typing this sentence “Now, this is the beginning of a community”.

It was at this moment that what would later be dubbed “the coup d’ ordinals” or the community coup began.

You Can’t Rug Bitcoin

If you have been in this space a while you have experienced or at least heard about hundreds of rug pulls. You know what you never hear about? A community led recovery from a rug pull, or what I like to call “unrugging a community”. We knew the odds were stacked against us, but we also knew some other things.

For instance we knew that ordinals are not NFTs, in that ordinals do not have smart contracts. Ordinals are Bitcoin, and Bitcoin is what, class? That’s right, Bitcoin is decentralized. We also knew that these cursed ordinal things were pretty rare, and that there would never be another cursed ordinal ever minted again post Jubilee. In addition to that we knew that we had a collection that was a specific kind of cursed ordinal known as a “yin yang” ordinal. This is because every NodeRock consists of a regular inscription tethered to a cursed inscription.

In addition to that we also understood that ordinals in general are destined to become more scarce over time. This will in all likelihood be related to high fees and higher Bitcoin prices in general. Ordinals are literally the perfect collectable, and quite frankly the first iteration of the Bitcoin economy. If you aren’t bullish on Bitcoin ordinals its either because you are a Bitcoin Amish, I mean maxi, or you are likely new to the ordinals space.

With this in mind we began our quest to become the first unrugged Bitcoin ordinals collection, and do the impossible. Spoiler alert: We did it.

NodeRocks Cook

It would take another 10,000 words, minimum, to go into the complete story of the NodeRocks community coup, and perhaps one day I will. Instead I am going to tell you what is coming next for this history making collection.

So what does a community bereft of any luxuries such as mint funds do to unrug itself? We simply found ourselves in the company of like-minded people with various skill sets to add value to the collection in order for the collection to add value to the community. While mint funds would have been nice, the truth is most teams couldn’t afford the talent we have within our community.

From full stack devs to creative artist we have all worked tirelessly in our mission, and with that in mind lets get into what I consider to be the most exciting news:

RUNES

At this point I could tell you about the mass market game that some of our community members are working on (there is an alpha version in our Discord), or the staking platform that is currently being built. Instead I am going to devote the rest of this article to what my inner degen is most excited about: Runes.

Runes are the latest creation from the original ordinals Wizard Casey Rodamor, and at their core they will function as a new token standard for the Bitcoin L1. At the time of this writing the protocol is not live yet, as it is scheduled to do so at the upcoming Bitcoin halving. Runes are already at the forefront of every degen’s mind, and seeing as though we are a decentralized community some NodeRocks community members have already started getting the NodeRocks ready for Runes on day 1.

The Takeaways

The term community has been abused in this space, and that is tragic because the reality of the situation is that in the Bitcoin economy, community is vital. We are demonstrating that in NodeRocks, and I am so proud to be a part of this movement. I encourage all of you to be a part of this, especially if what you learned about the NodeRocks lore resonates with you.

Thank you so much for reading, I hope you enjoyed it. I will be writing an upcoming article on the LEO token in the Stacks ecosystem. I am extremely bullish on this project, and have been meaning to write the article for quite some time, but I have been busy cooking in the NodeRocks kitchen.