Runes Protocol Generates $163 Million (2,513 BTC) in Fees Since Launch, but Activity Is Decreasing

The latest news from the NFT and Bitcoin market talks about Runes, a famous protocol for the generation of fungible tokens based on unspent transaction outputs (UTXO), which yesterday reached a significant milestone.

The Runes protocol, known for facilitating the creation of fungible tokens on Bitcoin using UTXO and OP_RETURN, has reportedly reached a significant milestone.

Since its launch on April 20, coinciding with the Bitcoin halving, Runes has collected over 2,500 BTC in fees, which is roughly equivalent to $163 million at the current exchange rate. This marks a period of growth for the decentralized finance (DeFi) sector on the primary blockchain network.

[DUNE] New #Bitcoin Protocol #Runes Generated $163 Million (2,513 #BTC) in Fees Since Launch

This achievement is particularly noteworthy during a crucial time for Bitcoin miners. Following the halving of block rewards and the less-than-stellar price action of BTC, miners must navigate a period of limited earnings. After the last halving, the block reward decreased from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC.

The introduction of Runes, along with NFTs via inscriptions and BRC-20 tokens, has provided an additional revenue stream for network miners through the high fees generated by these transactions.

In a recent interview, Nazar Khan, co-founder and COO of miner TeraWulf, stated, "The Runes have increased transaction fees significantly, so if anything there was an increase in hash price in the first 24 – 30 hours [after the halving]. Since then, we've seen transaction fees decrease, but compared to the average fees of 2023, they're still quite high."

Despite its launch just 2 months ago, the Runes protocol has quickly become the dominant standard for creating and issuing fungible crypto tokens, surpassing other similar standards and outperforming NFTs and BRC-20 in terms of activity on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Examining the distribution of transactions on the blockchain, we can observe a surge in Runes-related transactions starting April 20. During the initial days of existence, these transactions established a high presence, accounting for 47% to 81% of all transactions. Throughout the following weeks, they maintained a high level of activity overall.

However, as indicated by the Dune chart, there has been a drastic decrease in activity recently, dropping from 60% in June to the present level of 13.5%. In this context, Ordinals transactions with inscriptions for NFTs represent only 0.5% of the total network transactions, while BTC-20 transactions account for 3%. As of June 17, 2024, regular BTC transactions comprise 83.1%.