Methodology

The fair-launch score (Labs)

0.9.53

Open the dashboard

How widely a rune's mints were spread at launch: unique minters, the top 10's share, the first block's share, mints per minter and shared funding, in one score.

In one sentence

The fair-launch score combines five measures of how widely a rune's mints were spread across wallets and blocks (unique minters, the top 10's share, the first block's share, mints per minter and shared funding) into a weighted geometric mean from 0 to 100, always shown next to its parts.

What it is

A Labs experiment. For each rune with an open mint, we measure how widely its mints were spread across wallets and blocks, and combine the measures into one score from 0 to 100. The parts are always shown next to the score, so you can see why a rune scored as it did and disagree with the weighting.

A low score describes a launch, not an accusation. Mint bots, marketplaces and minting services all concentrate mints for ordinary reasons. The score says what the chain shows, not why.

Who counts as the minter

The address that received the minted runes. Under the Runes protocol a mint is added to the transaction's unallocated runes, edicts then move runes to outputs in order, and whatever is left goes to the pointer output if the Runestone sets one, otherwise to the first output that isn't OP_RETURN. The minter is the address that ends up with most of the mint. A mint whose runes land in an OP_RETURN output is burned: it counts toward the total, but has no minter. A cenotaph (a malformed Runestone) mints nothing to anyone and is left out.

The measures

Counted mints are those inside the mint window and, when we can tell, before the cap. The measures use the counted mints that reached an address.

• Unique minters: distinct receiving addresses.
• Top-10 share: the share of mints received by the 10 addresses with the most mints.
• First-block share: the share of mints confirmed in the first block that had any counted mint of the rune.
• Mints per minter: the median and the 90th percentile of mints per address.
• Shared funding: the share of mints made by addresses that were paid for from the same address as at least one other minter (the first input of each mint transaction). Shown only when we read the funding address for at least 90% of the mints.

The score

Each measure becomes a part from 0 to 1, where 1 means more widely spread:

Score = 100 × exp(Σ (weight × ln part) ÷ Σ weight), over the parts that could be measured, rounded to a whole number: a weighted geometric mean. Each part is counted as at least 0.01, so one zero doesn't force the whole score to exactly 0. A part that can't be measured (usually funding) drops out, and the others are re-weighted, so the score stays on the same 0 to 100 scale.

Why geometric rather than a plain average: a launch has to be spread on every part to score well. With a plain average, one wallet taking every mint slowly and from its own coins scored about 30, because its timing and funding parts looked fine. With the geometric mean it scores near 0; every mint going to a different, independently funded wallet across many blocks scores near 100. A rune with fewer than 20 counted mints gets its parts but no score.

Known limits

• From our node, before ord confirms. Without a full ord rune index we can't be sure each mint transaction minted. A mint sent after the cap was reached still appears on-chain but mints nothing. We read each rune's terms from its etching and leave out mints outside the window and past the cap. Ranking against the cap needs every block from the rune's start; when we don't have them, the cap is not applied and the rune says so. Once our ord index has the rune, its mint count replaces ours.
• Cenotaph mints count toward the cap on-chain, but we don't store them, so before ord answers our cap position can be a little late.
• Coverage. A rune's figures are "complete" only when we have every block from its etching (or later mint start) onward. Otherwise they read "partial since block N" and describe only the blocks we have, never the whole launch.
• Runes already on the inputs. A mint transaction that also spends runes of the same id could send them elsewhere; without an index we assume it carries none. This is rare.
• Shared funding is a hint, not proof: a minting service or exchange paying for many users' mints looks the same as one person running many wallets.

Also as plain Markdown. See every methodology page.

Last updated 2026-10-08