FAQs

What about MEV?

MEV (Miner Extractable Value) on Bitcoin is a new topic, gaining relevance with the introduction of Ordinals and Runes. Frontrunning (or "sniping") Ordinal or Rune purchases from the Mempool is increasing, though still on a small scale.

Trading Runes with the Relics Initiative AMM pools is similar to trading via DEX liquidity pools on Ethereum and Solana, which is heavily affected by MEV. This similarity naturally raises concerns that liquidity pools could enable MEV on Bitcoin.

However, our implementation has mechanisms in place to address this issue and prevent significant MEV on Bitcoin.

Runes with swaps vs Programmable Runes?

Our feature ideas will not make Runes generally programmable and we're not aiming for smart contract functionality.

Will there be a frontend for the swaps?

We are working on a swap interface with an embedded BTC wallet. The swap interface will also be open source and any company or individual can host it for others. We will not run any (paid) services.

Swapping against BTC?

On-chain liquidity pools with BTC don't work with Bitcoin's current functionality. That's why a base Rune is needed to swap against.

However, with the AMM pools it will be possible to swap against wrapped BTC Runes (like "WBTC") with a centralized reserve.

The same would work for stable coins like e.g. USDC.