Author: 798.eth
The first Ordinals project on Bitcoin, NodeStrategy, brings MicroStrategy’s treasury narrative to NFTs: buy monkeys, repurchase and burn, number go up—it sounds compelling. Yet it’s now trading at a 0.46x depth discount, with its price stagnant. The issue lies in its design itself: the fuel that powers this machine and the cage that locks it in are one and the same—the 10% transaction fee. Let’s break it down step by step.
First, let’s define NodeStrategy: a Bitcoin Rune token called NODESTRAT, with a total supply of one billion. It calls itself The Perpetual Monke Machine and is the first Ordinals digital asset vault on Bitcoin L1. The vault’s target asset is NodeMonkes, a blue-chip Ordinals NFT collection—note that it is not affiliated with the official NodeMonkes. It is traded on radFi, now known as Bound.
Now, how does the wheel turn? The diagram shows a four-step闭环. Every trade incurs a 10% fee: 90% goes to the treasury, and 10% goes to radFi. The treasury uses this fee to buy up NodeMonke floor assets, then lists the acquired monkeys as a ladder on Satflow, selling them at different profit targets. The BTC from monkey sales is 100% used to repurchase and burn NODESTRAT. Reduced supply drives up the price, attracting more traders and generating more fees—claimed to create a self-reinforcing cycle of increasing value. The entire script follows this single loop, sounding internally consistent. But it doesn’t actually spin—here’s why.
First, why can NODESTRAT only be traded on radFi / Bound?
First, understand the lifeline: the entire flywheel—buying, selling, and repurchasing for burning—relies entirely on that 10% fee. Without this fee, the treasury runs dry, and the system shuts down immediately.
So who collects that 10%, and at which layer? On Ethereum or Solana, this is straightforward—the token’s own contract can collect it. ERC20 tokens can implement fee-on-transfer, and Solana’s Token-2022 includes a TransferFee feature. With every transfer, the token’s own code deducts the tax, and no matter where you trade, the tax travels with the token.
But NODESTRAT is a Rune on Bitcoin. Bitcoin L1 has no smart contracts. A Rune is simply a balance entry in the Runes protocol ledger—a count recorded via an etch. It has no code, no transfer hooks, and no logic capable of executing on its own. You cannot create a Rune that automatically collects taxes. Transferring a Rune is just a regular Bitcoin transaction that moves the balance from one address to another; nothing in between can intercept and take 10%.
So this 10% doesn’t attach to the token itself—it only applies at the exchange level. It’s the radFi/Bound pool that deducts 10% at the moment you trade NODESTRAT, during transaction construction. The tax is enforced at the platform level; the token itself cannot deduct anything.
The inference is clear: this 10% exists only when trading on radFi/Bound. If you send NODESTRAT as a regular Rune peer-to-peer to a friend, or sell it on any other Ordinals marketplace, none of these transactions include the 10%, because no platform outside of Bound knows about this rule—or can enforce it.
Thus, the project has only one path forward: strictly confining all transactions within radFi/Bound. This is the only place in the world where this toll can be collected. Once liquidity flows elsewhere, fee revenue drops to zero, the treasury stops buying, and the flywheel dies immediately.
This also explains the 10% allocated to radFi. radFi is the toll booth, and NodeStrategy is responsible for directing all the traffic onto this road. The token is almost literally bound—its name is honest. Its entire value mechanism is held hostage on a single platform. This fragility is built into the design.
Second, why can't the price rise? What's the root cause?
Its script is "number go up," so why is it lying down? The real issue is that the machine's own fuel is poisoning its demand.
The machine ran out of fuel first. The flywheel burns trading volume, but volume is essentially dead—at just $9,000 per day. A 10% fee amounts to $900, with 90% going to the treasury—$810. Less than 0.01 BTC is swept per day. No volume means no fees; no fees mean no buying; no buying means the ladder has nothing to sell; no sales mean no buybacks; no buybacks mean no burns—and nothing happens to the price. The entire chain is idling.
Even more critical: that 10% isn’t just a fuel cost—it’s a headwind dragging down its own price. Buy with a 10% fee, sell with another 10% fee—that’s a 20% loss on a single round trip. The token must rise more than 20% just for traders to break even. You’re essentially asking people to buy something that deducts 10% on entry and another 10% on exit, instantly stifling speculative momentum. On one side, there’s the slight tailwind from buybacks and burns; on the other, the strong headwind of a 20% round-trip tax—both acting on the same token. It’s fighting itself.
The pipe was already tightly tightened. Buybacks are only triggered when a NodeMonke is actually sold from the ladder, and only the proceeds from selling Monkeys are used for buybacks. However, the NFT market has thin liquidity, resulting in slow and uncertain sales. To date, only 39 have been sold—15 from the short barrel, and zero from both the medium and long barrels. The buyback faucet is essentially dripping. The 30.77% that has already been burned.
Burns themselves do not create demand. Reducing supply can push prices up, but only if demand remains. Without volume, entry is still met with a 10% fee. You burn 30% of the supply, only to end up with a smaller market that still has no buyers. Price is determined by marginal supply and demand—it’s aggressively attacking the denominator, while demand on the numerator is locked down by taxes and dead volume.
That 0.46x discount is a self-imposed trap. The token price is only half of its NAV. A normal DAT can issue additional tokens to buy more assets when trading at a premium, thereby increasing its asset base further—this is the real leverage behind the “number go up” phenomenon. The only remaining lever to push the price is buybacks, but that’s been starved by the earlier issue. With no path to premium and no ability to execute buybacks, the discount remains permanently entrenched with no mechanism to eliminate it.
Finally, the NAV is twice the market cap—why isn't the price moving toward the NAV?
Holding NODESTRAT provides no redemption pathway—you cannot exchange it back for the implied 0.46 NodeMonke. Your only exit is to sell it to the next bidder on radFi, incurring an additional 10% fee. The NAV is a marketing figure, not a floor price; the market does not recognize it and prices it solely based on cash flow.
That 10% fee was meant to fuel the flywheel, but instead, it stifles the very demand and trading volume the flywheel needs most, while only being able to collect it by locking tokens on a single platform—also restricting liquidity. Added to that, the backing is non-redeemable and non-liquidatable, making the NAV unable to anchor the price. The design of this system essentially has the fuel source limiting its own demand.
Do not evaluate price movements; only explain the mechanism.
Is there a good way to keep this truly high-quality flywheel flying?
