Recently, a project called Odin.fun has been making waves on a small scale. It’s a launch pad for the Runes protocol similar to Pump.fun, and its small-scale popularity has brought heat to the bitcoin ecosystem. Its small-scale popularity has brought heat to the long-dormant bitcoin ecosystem, and on March 7, a community member reported that 74 bitcoins on the Odin.fun chain had disappeared or had been hacked. Soon after, the co-founders of the project responded on X that there was a bug in the hard deposit synchronization code that caused some users’ balances to exceed their deposits. As a result, no 74 BTC deposit transactions could be found on the chain, and current users’ funds are safe.
When it comes to the relationship between public chains and token launch platforms, it’s not hard to think of Solana and Pump.fun, as well as Base and Viturals, to name a few, where a hot token launch platform can bring a lot of traffic to the public chain it’s on. For example, when Viturals was on fire, Base had more net inflows than Solana.
This is one of the reasons why token-launching platforms are so popular. Unlike token launchers on other public chains, token launchers in the Bitcoin ecosystem like Odin.fun are not on the Bitcoin chain, but rather on Bitcoin’s second tier network for the sake of user experience and to minimize fees. The problem that these projects face is that it is difficult for them to share the security of the Bitcoin main chain, and the Odin.fun hack is a manifestation of this problem.
Another question worth exploring is whether a token-launching platform like Odin.fun, which sits on the second tier, has the potential to attract enough money and traffic for Bitcoin’s own ecological renaissance.
Odin.fun’s Product Design Logic
Odin.fun was founded in February 2025 by the founders of Bioniq, a Bitcoin ordinal marketplace, and is essentially a launch and trading platform for the Runes protocol. According to the official disclosure, in the past month, the trading volume of the Odin.fun platform exceeded 1,000 BTC, the number of addresses on the platform exceeded 37,000, and the market value of the leading rune, ODINDOG-ID-YTTL-ODIN, exceeded a maximum of $35 million.
The Runes protocol itself is not new; it was born after Bitcoin was halved in 2024. Developer Casey came up with the Ordinals inscription protocol earlier, and then the developers came up with the BRC-20 token protocol, but to solve the problems of inefficient transfers and UTXO bloat that BRC-20 exposed, Casey came up with the Runes protocol.
Thanks to these two protocols, Bitcoin has more ways to distribute assets than just storing value. And it’s thanks to these two protocols that the bitcoin ecosystem, the various infrastructures that are associated with it, are going to explode in 2023 and 2024.
One of the innovations in the crypto industry that hasn’t stopped is innovation in the way assets are distributed. odin.fun is a change in the way Runes Protocol assets are issued and traded.
For a token launching platform, the key to its success lies in the design of the “casino” experience, and whether it allows people to have a better “gambling” experience.
Odin.fun product, in terms of specific experience, first of all, in terms of asset issuance and trading, it realizes the second-level issuance of Runes assets and one-click trading of Runes assets issued on the platform.
According to the explanation given on its website, it is Odin.fun’s use of Valhalla, a two-tier solution, that enables the final confirmation of transactions to be completed in 2 seconds.
In addition to being fast, users can also experience account abstraction (no social login), no Gas transactions, and no need to repeat signatures to confirm transactions, all of which are very convenient.
All of this is possible because Odin.fun hides the underlying complexity of the chain. Odin.fun is a second-layer product under the Bitcoin main chain, which is officially called Valhalla.
And because it’s built on top of Bitcoin’s second layer, it’s a bitcoin wallet-based product that requires users to create an account with their own Bitcoin wallet, and then top up their wallet with Bitcoin to get into that account. The process of replenishing bitcoin is a process of cross-chaining bitcoin into the second layer of the program.
The second-layer program gives users convenience, but the official did not announce the details of how the second-layer technology is realized, and in this hacker oolong event, we can roughly peep out some of its technical loopholes or immature places.
According to its co-founders, when users deposit funds into the platform, they deposit them into the Threshold Signature Setup, a decentralized 12/34 threshold signature setup that secures BTC. These funds are then sent to the ODIN-FUN smart contract. All user BTC are linked to BTC in the Odin.fun platform on a 1:1 basis. The disappearance of the 74 Bitcoins was due to an error in the synchronization of the deposits, which caused them not to be displayed.
How is the security of the bitcoins deposited by users ensured? The official explanation is that it is done through multi-signature. But multi-signature is not absolute security, for the user can not manage their own assets, but the assets to the Odin platform, essentially still the logic of the centralized exchange.
Previously, X netizen @Real0xJason said that the BTC held by users on Odin.Fun is essentially ckBTC that exists on the ICP public chain, and the ultimate security guarantee for its safety comes from the ICP public chain, and there is no need for a cross-chain bridge between the ICP and the main Bitcoin network, and ICP’s chain-fusion cryptography allows its smart contracts to interact directly with the rest of the network, making it ICP’s chain-fusion encryption technology allows its smart contracts to interact directly with other networks, and is therefore more secure than the wrapped BTCs generated by the usual Bitcoin L2 cross-chain bridges.
As a token issuance and trading platform, the specific rules for token trading are as follows: On the platform, the process of token launch is called Ascend, which is the process of token bonding. Tokens created on Odin initially trade along a bonding curve. 80% of the tokens on this curve are traded. On this curve 80% of the token supply is sold at 0.211 BTC. In Odin, sats are used as the token price, with a token starting at 0.11 sats ($3,000 market capitalization) and completing Ascend at 4.76 sats ($100,000 market capitalization).
When Ascend is completed, a project enters the next stage, i.e. the AMM stage. According to the official website, once the tokens are bound (i.e. Ascend), the remaining 20% of the token supply and 0.2BTC will be deposited into the AMM pool to support further transactions. After that, token transactions will follow the AMM curve k = X * Y, instead of the previous binding curve y = e^x.
For users of the platform, not only can they launch and trade tokens, but they can also make LPs on top of it, and the platform has adopted a referral rebate marketing model, with 25% of the platform fees going to the referrals.
Can Odin.fun carry the flag for the revival of the bitcoin ecosystem?
The Bitcoin ecosystem is not doing so well at the moment, and there is no program like Inscription that can trigger universal participation. Because of this, the influx of money and traffic has not been able to trigger a new round of enthusiasm for the bitcoin ecosystem.
Pump.fun and Viturals have both developed their on-chain ecosystems because of the hype surrounding Meme, which has fueled Solana and Base’s own popularity. But odin.fun doesn’t seem to have created the same on-chain ecosystem boom. Moreover, the total market capitalization of its leading tokens peaked at only $35 million.
But odin.fun doesn’t apply to this logic, as MemePump is not the first of its kind to appear in the Bitcoin ecosystem, with Satspump.fun on Bitcoin’s second-layer Fractal, Lnpump.fun on the Lightning Network, and Stx.city on Stacks, to name a few. But none of these Meme Pumps on second-layer or sidechain networks have achieved the same level of popularity as Pump.fun.
After all, it’s hard for a later imitator to outperform a successful predecessor, and one of the main reasons for this is that these second-tier or sidechain Meme Pump platforms are actually less orthodox than the Bitcoin main chain. Odin.fun was able to make some noise this time around because of its focus on Runes, a new asset issuance method that is more connected to the main Bitcoin network. Plus, when the market is slow, there are fewer hotspots to get excited about.
But that’s the extent of Odin.fun’s impact, because it’s not something that’s as innovative and hype-inducing to the bitcoin ecosystem as inscriptions, and it’s just layered on top of two narratives that used to be very popular, runes and meme pumps, which are both old narratives now. So the project itself, the amount of heat it can generate is limited, and for the bitcoin ecosystem, such a project with a weak narrative can’t carry the flag of bitcoin’s revival.
It is possible for investors to participate with small amounts of money though. How to choose a token that has the potential to grow exponentially is a matter of looking at the community and looking at the dealer. And essentially it’s more of a gamble, the same way Meme is played.
