Magic Internet Money: The 2013 Meme That Became Rune No. 2

Open any Bitcoin Runes tracker in early November 2026 and the market looks like a one-dog town. Bitcoin itself trades near $76,960, down about 39% from its record of $126,080 set in October 2025, and the roughly seventeen Runes that data providers follow closely are worth something like $100 million put together. One of them, a token literally named after a cartoon dog, accounts for about four-fifths of that. The clear number two is stranger still: a thirteen-year-old joke drawn in MS Paint.

That joke is Magic Internet Money, ticker MIM, and on Bitcoin it is a Rune worth roughly $11 million. It began life in 2013 as a wizard sketched for a Reddit advertisement, spent a decade as one of crypto’s most-shared images, briefly became a BRC-20 token, and then migrated onto Casey Rodarmor’s Runes protocol at the 2024 halving. This is the biography of that token: where the wizard came from, how its supply works, why it melted up more than 400% and then gave most of it back, why Kraken decided a meme was worth listing, and what a coin that its own data provider calls a digital artifact of whimsy, devoid of practical utility or purpose, is actually for.

A quiet market and a 13-year-old wizard

Start with the numbers, because they frame everything that follows. According to CoinGecko, Bitcoin changed hands around $76,962 in early November, off 1.4% on the day and 3.8% on the week, with a market capitalization near $1.55 trillion and about 20.1 million coins in circulation. The Runes category has no reliable single headline figure; thin-float tokens routinely glitch the aggregate upward, so treat any quoted category total with suspicion. What is clean is the top of the table. DOG•GO•TO•THE•MOON, the dog token, carried a market cap near $76.5 million. MAGIC•INTERNET•MONEY sat second at about $11.4 million. Nothing else cleared $3 million.

Being the second-biggest token in a sleepy corner of Bitcoin is not, on its own, a headline. What makes MIM worth a closer look is how it got there. DOG earned its crown through the single largest airdrop in Runes history; most of the rest of the field is a churn of tokens that mint, spike, and fade within weeks. MIM has quietly held the number two slot through a full market cycle, and it did so without a team, a treasury, a roadmap, or a product. It is held up by a story and a fixed supply, which turns out to be a useful lens on what Runes are, who pays for them, and why Bitcoin wanted a token protocol in the first place, a question we unpacked in our look at who actually pays Bitcoin’s security bill.

What a Rune is, in a minute

Runes are a way to issue fungible tokens directly on Bitcoin, with no sidechain, no bridge, and no smart-contract virtual machine. The protocol was designed by Casey Rodarmor, the same developer behind Ordinals, and it went live at block 840,000 in April 2024, the block that also carried the fourth Bitcoin halving. A Rune lives as a record attached to Bitcoin’s unspent-output set: a single OP_RETURN output, called a runestone, encodes the etching, minting, or transfer of a token, and ordinary Bitcoin wallets that do not understand Runes simply ignore it. There is no separate chain and no separate token-standard contract; the ledger is Bitcoin’s, and the rules are enforced by the indexers that read the runestones.

Rodarmor never pretended he was building a serious financial system. In the run-up to launch he described Runes, to CoinDesk, as built for “degens and memecoins,” and said he was “creating a venue for people to create sh*tcoins.” The timing was deliberate. The halving cut the block subsidy from 6.25 to 3.125 BTC, and a token protocol that generated transaction fees could, in theory, help replace some of that lost issuance with fee demand, the metric miners live and die by and which we follow through hashprice. For a few weeks in 2024 it worked spectacularly; for most of the time since, it has not. MIM is a product of both phases: a token that only exists because Rodarmor built a venue for exactly this kind of thing, and a token whose price chart is a near-perfect record of Runes mania rising and fading.

The 2013 wizard: where the meme came from

The name is older than almost everything else in this story. In 2013, a Reddit moderator who ran the r/bitcoin community under the handle theymos opened a thread asking users for ideas for a Reddit advertisement. According to the account Kraken co-chief executive Arjun Sethi later recounted, within about an hour an artist posting as Mavensbot answered with a crude MS Paint drawing: a hooded wizard holding a staff, conjuring coins, under the hand-lettered words Magic Internet Money. The ad ran. The image did not stay an ad for long.

Over the next decade the wizard became one of the most durable in-jokes in crypto, shorthand for the knowing absurdity of the whole enterprise: yes, this is magic internet money, and yes, we are serious about it anyway. It survived bull markets and bear markets, got reprinted on stickers and T-shirts, and lodged itself in the collective memory of a generation of Bitcoiners. That cultural half-life is the entire asset. When MIM later appeared as a token, it was not selling a technology or a yield; it was selling a claim on a meme that people already knew by heart, which is a rarer thing in a market where most tokens are inventing their lore from scratch.

From BRC-20 to Rune: the migration

MIM did not start on Runes, because Runes did not exist yet. The token first launched in March 2023 as a BRC-20, the experimental Ordinals-based token format that briefly clogged Bitcoin blocks that year. Per the history Sethi laid out, the launch was deliberately plain: no presale, no team allocation, no venture investors, no hidden unlocks. When Rodarmor shipped Runes at the April 2024 halving, MIM migrated across, etched into block 840,000 itself, the first block that could ever carry a Rune. Token trackers list its Rune identifier as 840000:45 and label it as roughly the seventeenth Rune ever etched, with the artwork attributed to the same Mavensbot behind the original 2013 meme, per the explorer Ordiscan.

The migration had a hard stop. The window to move BRC-20 MIM onto Runes closed in April 2025, and any supply that holders never bridged was, by the project’s account, sent to Satoshi Nakamoto’s original genesis wallet, an address whose coins have never moved and almost certainly never will. In practice that is a burn with a sense of theater: unclaimed tokens were not destroyed by an opcode but exiled to the one wallet in Bitcoin everybody agrees is untouchable. The result is a token that is unusually clean on paper, which the identity card below lays out.

One nuance matters for anyone comparing MIM to DOG. On the Runes side, MIM is technically a premine: all 21 billion units were brought into existence at the moment of etching, not handed out through an open mint. But the fair distribution had already happened a year earlier on the BRC-20 side, so the premine was a migration bridge, not a founder’s war chest. DOG, by contrast, was distributed entirely through a free airdrop that ran natively on Runes via the Runestone collection. Both are called fair launches; they arrived at fairness by different routes, and the distinction is the sort of thing that only becomes load-bearing when regulators or buyers start asking who got the tokens first.

Anatomy of 21 billion

MIM has a supply of 21,000,000,000 tokens, and the number is not an accident. Twenty-one billion is twenty-one million, Bitcoin’s hard cap, multiplied by a thousand, a wink at the asset it is riding on. All of it is circulating. There is no vesting schedule, no locked treasury, and no mechanism to mint more; the etching fixed the supply permanently, and trackers such as CoinGecko and Ordiscan both show the full 21 billion already in the open market. For a memecoin, that is about as simple as a cap table gets: whatever MIM is worth, it is split across a fixed pool that no insider can quietly dilute.

The mechanics behind that simplicity are worth spelling out. Etching a Rune writes its parameters, its name, supply, divisibility, and an optional currency symbol, permanently into a single Bitcoin transaction; once the block confirms, none of it can be changed. MIM carries a divisibility that lets each token split into smaller units for trading, and because its terms left no open mint, the 21 billion figure is not a soft cap that creeps upward but a hard total. The token also exists as a bridged asset on Solana, which widens where it can trade without touching the Bitcoin-native supply that anchors it. In a sector where quietly adjustable supplies and hidden mint functions have burned buyers repeatedly, a Rune’s immutability is a feature, even when the thing it makes immutable is a wizard joke.

A word of caution before anyone searches for the ticker. There is a second, completely unrelated token also called Magic Internet Money, also abbreviated MIM: the dollar-pegged stablecoin issued by the Abracadabra.money lending protocol on Ethereum and Avalanche. That MIM is a different asset entirely, with a different purpose, a different chain, and a different team, and it spent much of 2026 unwinding troubled lending markets while trading far below its intended one-dollar peg. The Bitcoin Rune covered here has nothing to do with it beyond sharing a name. If you see a price near four cents and a DeFi stablecoin description, you are looking at the wrong MIM.

The June 2025 melt-up, and the fall

For most of its life MIM was a quiet few-million-dollar token. Then came June 2025. Over the month the price ran from around $0.0017 to a peak near $0.0088 on June 16, a gain of roughly 417%, and the market cap briefly touched about $184 million, according to an account of the episode published by Bitget. The speculated trigger was a post from Kraken teasing a theme it called Rune June, which the market read as a signal that a major exchange listing was coming. No listing had actually been confirmed at that point; the rally was built on anticipation of one.

Then it reversed. From the top, MIM fell roughly 79%, and about $145 million of paper value evaporated as the market cap sank back toward $39 million. The round trip is a textbook illustration of how a thin-float token behaves when a single catalyst does all the lifting: there is not enough resting liquidity to absorb profit-taking, so the same reflexivity that powered the spike powers the collapse. It is also a reminder that most Runes, MIM included for long stretches, trade below the price at which their holders acquired them. An analysis by BlockEden marking the protocol’s first year found the same pattern across the category: an explosive launch, a rapid decline, and a long quiet aftermath in which most tokens never revisit their highs.

The episode also previewed a structural truth the whole category keeps relearning: a Rune’s quoted market cap is a fragile number. Multiply a thin, lightly traded float by the last print and you get a headline that can swing tens of millions of dollars on a few hundred thousand dollars of real volume. MIM’s run to $184 million and back was not a story about $184 million changing hands; it was a story about a small amount of buying, and then selling, repricing a large notional supply. That is worth remembering every time a tracker flashes a big category total, and it is why this piece leans on the top two names, which trade often enough to price honestly, rather than on the aggregate.

Kraken, a brand, and a moat

The listing the June rumor anticipated eventually arrived. In August 2025 Kraken added MIM, filing it under its meme category, and the exchange’s price page still carries it today. What made it notable was the framing from the top. In a thread explaining the decision, Kraken co-chief executive Arjun Sethi wrote that at the exchange “we know every coin has a story,” and that for MIM “that story is about reviving one of the most iconic memes in crypto history.” He then retold the 2013 origin, theymos and the ad thread and the wizard, as the reason the token deserved a seat on a regulated venue. It is hard to think of another asset class where a major exchange justifies a listing by recounting a Reddit joke.

That is the closest thing MIM has to a moat. A memecoin with no product competes on exactly one axis, attention, and a tier-one exchange listing is a durable attention advantage: it is a distribution channel, a liquidity venue, and a stamp of a certain kind of legitimacy, all at once. Thousands of Runes will never clear the bar an exchange sets; MIM did, on the strength of a story that predates Runes by eleven years. What a listing does not do is manufacture fundamentals. It gives MIM access, not earnings, and access can be matched by any other venue that decides the meme is worth the shelf space.

Where MIM actually trades: thin by design

Away from Kraken, MIM trades the way every Rune does: slowly, and entirely on-chain. There is no native order book on Bitcoin and no built-in leverage. A sale is a partially signed Bitcoin transaction, a PSBT, in which the seller signs away a specific Rune output at a specific price and a buyer countersigns, adds payment, and broadcasts the result; settlement is atomic and non-custodial, but it is also one transaction at a time, confirmed in a block. Liquidity, in other words, is literally a stack of signed offers sitting in a marketplace, not a pool of resting bids. The venues that host those offers have consolidated: after Magic Eden shut its Bitcoin, Ordinals, and Runes markets in March 2026 to refocus on Solana, the main destinations became OKX, UniSat, and Xverse, with Kraken and MIM’s Solana bridge adding centralized and cross-chain depth on top.

The practical effect shows up in the volume line. CoinGecko recorded roughly $22,000 of MIM trading over a recent twenty-four-hour window, a rounding error next to its $11 million market cap, which is why a single motivated buyer or seller can move the price several percent. Holding MIM also means holding Bitcoin UTXOs directly and signing your own PSBTs, so the security model is the self-custody one we examined in our hardware-wallet comparison: the seed phrase is the single point of failure, not a smart contract. On the upside, because every trade settles on Bitcoin’s base layer rather than through a mempool full of competing bots, MIM is largely untouched by the sandwiching and reordering games that define MEV on Ethereum; the tradeoff is that the same base layer makes high-frequency liquidity impossible.

MIM vs DOG vs UNCOMMON•GOODS

To see what kind of token MIM is, put it next to the two Runes it is most often compared with. DOG•GO•TO•THE•MOON is the category’s giant, a 100-billion-supply dog meme distributed entirely through a free airdrop to Ordinals holders and now bridged to Solana and StarkNet, with a market cap near $76.5 million per CoinGecko. UNCOMMON•GOODS is the opposite end of the spectrum: the genesis Rune, identifier 840000:0, the very first token Rodarmor etched, with a free open mint that has been running since launch and is scheduled to continue until roughly the next halving. Its supply keeps growing as people mint, sitting around 171 million units for a market cap near $2.1 million, also per CoinGecko. MIM lands between them in size and, more interestingly, in philosophy.

Three tokens, three definitions of a fair launch. DOG gave everything away at once to an existing community. UNCOMMON•GOODS gives itself away continuously to anyone willing to pay the mint fee, which doubles as a slow, permanent demonstration of how Runes minting works. MIM distributed itself fairly on a different protocol first, then carried that distribution across. None of them has a treasury or an insider allocation, which is exactly why they are the three most-cited names when people argue about what a credible Bitcoin memecoin looks like. The differences are not cosmetic: a token that is still minting has a rising supply working against its price, while MIM’s fixed 21 billion means its chart is pure demand, with no issuance headwind.

The power law: one dog and a long tail

Zoom out and the Runes market is a near-perfect power law. DOG alone is worth something like four-fifths of the roughly $100 million that the serious tokens add up to. MIM, at about $11 million, is the whole of the second tier more or less by itself, taking close to a tenth of the market. Everything after that, UNCOMMON•GOODS, Pups, Billy, RSIC•GENESIS•RUNE, LOBO•THE•WOLF•PUP, and the rest, shares a sliver of a few million dollars between them, and the quoted numbers for those smaller names frequently disagree across data providers because the float is too thin to price cleanly. In a market this concentrated, being number two is not a modest achievement; it is the entire runner-up prize.

That concentration is the signal worth sitting with. Attention is the only resource these tokens compete for, and attention is winner-take-most. DOG won the dog bracket; MIM won the heritage-meme bracket, the slot reserved for the one token whose reference everyone already understands. Holding the number two position through the full 2025-to-2026 cycle, including the melt-up, the crash, and the long grind afterward, tells you MIM’s holders are not purely chasing the next pump. They are holding a collectible with a brand, and brands in memecoins are rarer and stickier than charts suggest.

Can a meme have utility? BTCfi, Liquidium, and Alkanes

The counterargument to treating MIM as a pure collectible is that a financial layer is slowly forming around Runes, and a token that can be lent, staked, or pooled is worth more than one that can only be held. The most-used piece of that layer is Liquidium, a Bitcoin-native lending market where Runes and Ordinals serve as collateral through partially signed transactions and discreet log contracts, with no wrapping and no bridge. Liquidium has since added a liquid-staking token, sLIQ, that pays holders a share of lending revenue rather than paying them with inflation. A more experimental effort, Alkanes, built by Oyl Corp, aims to run WebAssembly smart contracts on top of the Runes model, which would make programmable finance on Bitcoin possible, though the heavy lifting executes off-chain in a specialized indexer, a trust assumption that pure on-chain Bitcoiners notice.

Alkanes co-founder and chief executive Alec Taggart has framed the whole project as a matter of staying native. Bitcoin, he told Decrypt, “doesn’t need to imitate Ethereum to evolve,” calling it “a native system built for those who believe Bitcoin is enough.” It is a compelling pitch, but the scale check is sobering: research from Spark puts the total value locked in Bitcoin DeFi at a small fraction of what Ethereum carries, with the share of circulating BTC working in DeFi measured in fractions of a percent against double digits for ether. And even a mature BTCfi stack would not make MIM itself useful. CoinGecko’s own listing describes the token, flatly, as a digital artifact of whimsy, devoid of practical utility or purpose. That is not an insult; it is the product. MIM is a meme you can own, and it is priced as one.

Why most Runes, and most memes, fade

The honest bear case for MIM is the bear case for almost every memecoin. There are no cash flows, no buybacks funded by revenue, and no yield that the token itself produces; the only fuel is attention, and attention rotates. Survivorship bias flatters the whole category, because the tokens anyone talks about are the handful that did not go to zero, while the thousands that minted, spiked, and died never make the charts. The broader graveyard, from AI-agent tokens that promised autonomous on-chain funds to celebrity coins that promised nothing at all, is full of assets that had a narrative and a pump and nothing underneath. A fixed supply and a clean cap table do not save a token from simply being forgotten.

What tilts MIM’s odds, relative to the field, is the durability of its reference. A meme that has survived thirteen years has already proven it is not a one-cycle fad, and a token tied to it inherits some of that half-life. Add a tier-one exchange listing and a supply that no insider can inflate, and MIM has more of a moat than perhaps ninety-nine percent of the tokens that have ever launched on Runes. That is a real edge. It is also still not a fundamental. The most accurate way to hold MIM is the way you would hold a rare sticker of a wizard: because you like the wizard, and because other people might like it later, not because it will pay you.

MIM and the SEC: memecoins and the rulebook

For a US reader the obvious question is whether a token like MIM is a security. The clearest official signal came in February 2025, when the staff of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Division of Corporation Finance issued a statement saying that meme coins, as the staff described them, generally are not securities: they are bought for entertainment or cultural reasons, not as investments in a common enterprise whose profits depend on the efforts of others, so their purchase and sale do not involve the registration that the securities laws require. By that reasoning, a fairly distributed, issuerless meme like MIM sits outside the securities perimeter, and in any case there is no issuer left to register, the supply was fixed years ago and the migration window is closed.

Two caveats keep this from being a clean all-clear. A staff statement is a view, not a rule, and the agency’s enforcement posture continues to evolve, as we traced in our account of SEC crypto enforcement after the comment window; the classification of any specific token still turns on its facts. And across the Atlantic the European Union’s MiCA regime was written around issuers who publish white papers and stand behind their tokens, a structure that simply does not map onto an issuerless Rune minted by nobody in particular. That mismatch is a genuine gap rather than a settled answer, and it is one reason Runes remain easier to trade than to formally regulate.

What to watch

MIM is a small token, but the things that will move it are the same forces shaping all of Runes heading into 2027. A short checklist for anyone tracking it:

• The name clock. Five-letter Rune names unlock at block 980,000, around mid-December 2026, and a fresh scramble for short names could either pull speculative attention toward brand-new etchings or, if it reignites interest in Runes generally, lift established names like MIM.
• Exchange depth. Whether Kraken deepens MIM’s order book or another tier-one venue adds it, since centralized liquidity is the one thing on-chain PSBT trading cannot easily provide.
• BTCfi milestones. Any sign that Liquidium, Alkanes, or a Runes-native automated market maker gives holders something to do with a token besides hold it.
• Bitcoin’s tape. With BTC near $76,960 and down on the week ahead of a December Federal Reserve decision, memecoins are a high-beta bet on Bitcoin itself; a weak base layer drags the whole Runes complex down with it.
• The pecking order. Whether MIM keeps the number two slot against challengers, and whether DOG’s roughly four-fifths dominance of the real market ever meaningfully cracks.

None of those will turn a whimsical artifact into a cash-flow business. What they will decide is whether the second-largest token on Bitcoin’s token protocol is a durable cultural asset or a slowly fading relic of the 2024 mania. Thirteen years in, the wizard has outlasted longer odds than this.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Magic Internet Money (MIM)?

Magic Internet Money (MIM) is a fungible token on Bitcoin’s Runes protocol, built around the Magic Internet Money wizard meme that first appeared in a 2013 Reddit advertisement for r/bitcoin. It launched fairly as a BRC-20 token in 2023, migrated to Runes at the April 2024 halving, and in late 2026 is the second-largest Rune by market capitalization at roughly 11 million dollars.

Is the MIM Rune the same as Abracadabra’s MIM stablecoin?

No. The Bitcoin Rune MIM is a memecoin with no utility and a fixed 21 billion supply. Abracadabra.money’s MIM is a separate dollar-pegged DeFi stablecoin on Ethereum and Avalanche, with a different team and a different purpose. They share only a name and a ticker, so always check the chain and the price before trading.

How many MIM tokens are there?

MIM has a fixed supply of 21,000,000,000 tokens, which is 21 million, Bitcoin’s own cap, multiplied by one thousand. All of it is circulating. There is no team allocation, no vesting, and no way to mint more, because the supply was fixed when the token was etched into Runes.

Why did Magic Internet Money surge and crash in 2025?

In June 2025 MIM rose about 417% to an all-time high near 0.0088 dollars on June 16, lifting its market cap to roughly 184 million dollars, after Kraken teased a Rune June theme that markets read as a coming listing. With a thin float and a single catalyst, the move reversed sharply, falling about 79% and erasing around 145 million dollars in paper value.

Where can you buy or trade MIM?

MIM trades on the Kraken exchange, which lists it as a meme coin, and on-chain through Bitcoin Runes marketplaces such as OKX, UniSat, and Xverse, where trades settle as partially signed Bitcoin transactions. It is also bridged to Solana. Liquidity is thin, with daily volume often in the low tens of thousands of dollars, so prices can move quickly.

Marcus Okafor is a markets writer at HOGE Wire covering Bitcoin, Runes, and the BTCfi economy.