The founder of Ordinals announced the Runes document, introducing the "cenotaphs" upgrade mechanism

Golden Finance reports that Ordinals founder Casey Rodarmor has published the Runes document on the X platform. Runes allows Bitcoin transactions to etch, mint, and transfer native digital goods of Bitcoin. The information of the Rune protocol is called Runestones, which are stored in the output of Bitcoin transactions. A transaction can only have one Runestone at most. Runestones can etch a new rune, mint an existing rune, and transfer runes from input to output in a transaction; transaction outputs can carry any number of rune balances. For various reasons, some runestones may be malformed; these are known as cenotaphs. Any runes entered into cenotaph transactions will be destroyed. The coins minted in transactions with cenotaphs count towards the minting limit but will be burned after being created. Cenotaphs serve as an upgrade mechanism allowing runes to take on new semantics thereby changing their creation and transmission methods without misleading un-upgraded clients about their location since they would see these runes as having been destroyed.