Bitcoin Runes Protocol Daily Fees Drop 98% to $1 Million

According to data from Glassnode, transactions on Bitcoin’s Runes protocol generated $117 million in cumulative Bitcoin network fee revenue after the halving, with $62.4 million accrued on the day of the halving itself.

However, this increase proved to be short-lived. Recent data reveals that as of April 28, Runes transactions contributed just $1.03 million in fees.

On April 20, the day of the halving, transaction fees within the Bitcoin network saw a significant increase. This increase was mainly linked to the implementation of the Runes protocol, leading to higher mining rates.

Transactions in Runes represented a 57.7% share of all transactions on the Bitcoin network. Financial transactions lagged behind with a share of 41.5%, while Ordinals and BRC-20 represented 0.5% and 0.2%, respectively.

Runes Fees

This dominance persisted throughout the halving weekend, with Runes maintaining the majority of network activity. On April 21, for example, transactions using the protocol represented 51.6% of total transactions.

However, by April 22, this dominance began to decline, falling to 42.5%, while Bitcoin financial transactions claimed a larger share, representing 56.5% of the total transactions processed that day. However, the situation has changed since then, with transaction fees decreasing.

According to Bitcoin researcher Jade Ardinals, the increased load on the network was mainly caused by issuance. Ardinals explained that speculation surrounding Runes has caused an increase in issuance activity. And this created “artificial” pressure on Bitcoin’s block space.

Analysts anticipate that this pressure will ease over time. However, they claim that Runes will continue to attract more developers to Bitcoin.

Tokens created on the Runes protocol have already captured a large portion of Bitcoin’s on-chain activity. According to Crypto Koryo’s Dune panel, on April 25, these assets comprised 45% of all Bitcoin transactions.

Casey Rodarmor developed Runes for Bitcoin seeking to improve the BRC-20 standard, known for its costly creation and management of tokens on the blockchain due to its proliferation of UTXO.

Bitcoin faces challenges with the accumulation of unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs), which overload the network and lead to performance issues. Runes allows users to perform more efficient transactions and create better optimized tokens on Bitcoin.