During the Bitcoin halving on April 19, developer Casey Rodarmor created Runes, a way for people to etch fungible tokens onto satoshis, the smallest unit of bitcoin (BTC). The DeFi-enabling novelty has since exploded into a behemoth for Bitcoin transactions, per a Dune dashboard from Crypto Koryo.

OpenDelta’s flagship token, USDO, will retain its dollar value by hedging bitcoin (BTC) deposited by users as collateral. The token won’t go live till May, and even then, it will only be open to waitlisters in a closed beta. But the company behind it plans to bring Runes to other Bitcoin layers as well.

The product will be yield-bearing for its holders, Wünscher said. It will generate this upside from the funding rates in derivatives markets that it trades in to retain its dollar value. To mint USDO, users will deposit bitcoin as collateral into a wallet that will be controlled by "institutional-grade custodians,” according to a press release.

OpenDelta is among the first companies building the new face of DeFi for Bitcoin in the Runes era. As Wünscher sees it, the kind of people who are deeply into Bitcoin (he counts himself as one) aren’t necessarily attuned to the norms and nonsense of Ethereum DeFi, he said.

“We can create new experiences on Bitcoin because people have not been pre-exposed to any other things than Bitcoin,” he said.

Bitcoin Stablecoin Runes Venture Capital Exclusive

Danny Nelson

Danny is CoinDesk's managing editor for Data & Tokens. He formerly ran investigations for the Tufts Daily. At CoinDesk, his beats include (but are not limited to): federal policy, regulation, securities law, exchanges, the Solana ecosystem, smart money doing dumb things, dumb money doing smart things and tungsten cubes. He owns BTC, ETH and SOL tokens, as well as the LinksDAO NFT.