NodeStrategy: The first Ordinals DAT project, bringing the Strategy Treasury narrative onto NFTs

Author: 798.eth

Bitcoin’s first claimed Ordinals DAT project, NodeStrategy. It takes the MicroStrategy treasury narrative and brings it to NFTs—buying monkeys, buybacks and burns, number go up. It sounds very smooth. But it’s now trading at a 0.46x deep discount, with the price flat and unmoving. The problem is in the design itself. The “fuel” that powers this machine and the “cage” that traps it are the same thing: that 10% transaction fee. Let’s break it down step by step.

First, what is NodeStrategy. A Bitcoin Rune Token called NODESTRAT, with a total supply of 1 billion. It calls itself The Perpetual Monke Machine, the first Ordinals digital-asset treasury on Bitcoin L1. The treasury’s target is NodeMonkes, a blue-chip Ordinals NFT series—note that it has no relation to the official NodeMonkes. The trading venue is radFi, which is now Bound.

Next, how does the flywheel turn? It’s drawn as a four-step closed loop. Every buy and sell takes a 10% fee: 90% goes into the treasury, and 10% goes to radFi. The treasury uses that fee to sweep the NodeMonke floor. The swept monkeys are then posted as a ladder (order ladder) and sold on Satflow at different profit targets. The BTC from the monkey sales is 100% used to buy back and burn NODESTRAT. As supply decreases, the price rises; more people come to trade, which generates more fees. It claims that the more it turns, the more valuable it becomes. The whole script is basically just one storyline and feels internally consistent. But it doesn’t turn—here’s why.

Point one: Why can NODESTRAT only be traded on radFi / Bound.

First, understand the root. The entire flywheel—sweeping inventory, selling it, buyback and burn—relies entirely on that 10% fee. Without this fee, the treasury has no money, and the machine stops immediately.

So who collects that 10%, and at what layer. If this were on Ethereum or Solana, it would be simple: the token contract could collect it itself. On ERC20, you can write fee-on-transfer; on Solana, Token-2022 has TransferFee. Each transfer deducts a tax via the token’s own code—no matter where you trade, the tax follows the token.

But NODESTRAT is a Rune on Bitcoin. Bitcoin L1 has no smart contracts. A Rune is simply a balance record in the Runes protocol ledger: you etch a number, with no code, no transfer hooks, and no logic that can execute itself. You can’t create a Rune that automatically collects tax. Sending a Rune is just a normal Bitcoin transaction that moves a balance; there’s nothing in between that can intercept and skim 10%.

So this 10% can’t attach itself to the coin. It can only attach to the trading venue. It’s radFi / Bound’s pool: at the moment you trade NODESTRAT, the 10% is deducted in the construction of the transaction. The tax is at the platform layer; the token itself cannot deduct even a single cent.

The conclusion follows. This 10% only exists when trading on radFi / Bound. If you treat NODESTRAT like a normal Rune and send it point-to-point to a friend, or sell it on another Ordinals marketplace, there is no 10%—because outside Bound, no place else even knows this rule, and no place can enforce it.

So the project is left with only one lifeline: keep all trading tightly confined within radFi / Bound. There’s only one place worldwide that can collect this toll. Once liquidity flows elsewhere, fee income goes to zero, the treasury stops sweeping, and the flywheel dies immediately.

This also explains the portion of that 10% that goes to radFi. radFi is the toll station, and NodeStrategy is responsible for funneling all traffic onto this road. The coin is, in a literal sense, “bound” by Bound—hence the name. Its entire value mechanism is collateralized on a single platform, like a hostage. This fragility is baked into the design.

Point two: Why can’t the price rise? Where’s the root.

Its script is number go up—so why is it just sitting there. The real issue is that the machine’s own “fuel” poisons the very demand it needs.

The machine is out of fuel first. The flywheel burns transaction volume, but volume is basically dead—about $9K per day. A 10% skim means $900, and of that, 90% (810) goes into the treasury. It can’t sweep even 0.01 BTC per day. Without volume there’s no fees; without fees there’s no sweeping; without sweeping there’s no inventory to sell on the ladder; without selling there’s no buyback; without buybacks there’s no burn. Nothing happens to the price. The whole chain is idling.

Worse, the 10% is not only the fuel—it’s also a headwind that presses down on its own price. Buy with a 10% fee, then sell with another 10% fee: a round trip loses 20% first. The coin has to rise by more than 20% before traders even break even. You’re effectively asking people to buy something with a 10% entry fee and a 10% exit fee—the speculative trading speed gets throttled. On one side there’s the tailwind from buyback and burn; on the other side, the 20% round-trip tax is a headwind blowing against the same coin. It’s fighting itself.

The buyback pipeline is already tightened to the extreme. Buybacks only trigger when a NodeMonke is actually sold off the ladder; only the money from selling monkeys is used for buybacks. But the NFT marketplace is thin, slow, and uncertain. So far, it has sold only 39 total—15 in the short ladder; the medium and long ladders are 0. The buyback faucet is basically just dripping. The 30.77% has already been burned.

Burning itself doesn’t create demand. Cutting supply can push prices up—only if demand is still there. With no volume, entering the market still costs a 10% fee. Burning 30% of the supply only gives you a smaller order book that still has no bids. Price is marginal supply and demand: supply gets attacked on one side, while demand is locked by taxes and dead trading volume on the other.

That 0.46x discount is a trap that traps itself. The coin’s price is only half of NAV. When normal DATs trade at a premium, they can mint more tokens to buy more assets; the more they buy, the thicker it gets—this is the real leverage behind number go up. The only remaining lever to push price is buyback, but it’s being starved by what came before. Since the premium path can’t run, and the buyback path can’t move, the discount just hangs there—there’s no mechanism to pull it back.

Finally, with NAV double the market cap, why isn’t the price moving toward NAV.

Holding NODESTRAT provides no redemption channel. You can’t exchange the coin back into the implied 0.46x NodeMonke. Your only exit is to sell it on radFi to the next bidder—and you must pay another 10% on the way out. That NAV is a marketing number, not a floor price. The market doesn’t recognize it; it prices only based on capital flows.

That 10% fee was supposed to feed the flywheel, but it taxes exactly the demand and trading volume the system needs most—and it can only be collected by locking the coin onto a single platform, which also caps liquidity. On top of that, the backing is non-redeemable and not liquid, so the NAV anchor can’t hold the price. The design of this machine makes the fuel source end up constraining its own demand.

No need to evaluate up or down—just the mechanism.

Is there a good way to let this flywheel, which is fundamentally solid, keep taking off?

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