The user experience of BRC-20s and Runes felt disappointing to most crypto enthusiasts. While ordinals and inscriptions are widely considered to be a superior version of NFTs on other chains, Runes and BRC-20s do not meet the standard set by fungible tokens on other networks.

The source of the frustration is a fundamental issue with these protocols: bitcoin consensus (bitcoin nodes and miners) isn’t aware of their existence.

That means that whenever anyone wants to trade BTC for runes or vice versa, they have to jump through cumbersome steps to “lie and cheat the code” and get the bitcoin network to do what they want. Sort of.

That’s why you have to split your runes UTXOs. That’s why people have to buy the entire listing of a rune and can’t just buy part of it. That’s why you can’t do bids. That’s why you can’t have liquidity pools and AMMs.