The activity of the Runes protocol has dropped dramatically since the first week of trade. In comparison to other times, there was a noticeable drop in activity on May 10th, with very few new wallets and mints engaging with the system. Runes Is’s compilation of a Dune analytics dashboard shows a consistent decline in the protocol’s fee revenue. Runes continues to receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees every day on the Bitcoin blockchain, but in the last twelve days, the total fees have only crossed $1 million twice, indicating a sharp decline.
A new standard for Bitcoin tokens called Runes enables users to produce fungible tokens on the network. Casey Rodarmor, the man behind Ordinals, which made Bitcoin nonfungible tokens possible, designed these. Three weeks have passed since the Runes protocol launched on April 19, the day of the most recent Bitcoin halving event. Runes’ release sent investors into a frenzy, which in turn caused transaction fees to soar and gave Bitcoin miners an unprecedented windfall—more than $135 million in fees were collected in the first week alone.
Up until April 24, the bulk of transactions on the Bitcoin network were rune-related, according to data from Dune Analytics. With Runes claiming the largest transaction share on April 23, at 81.3%, the Bitcoin transaction share dropped to 18.15%, while Ordinals and BRC-20 transactions each accounted for 0.1% of the total. Over the following nine days, runes trades steadily decreased until May 2. May 3 was when Runes started to get better. Runes was able to recover its transaction share above 60% on May 4 and 5.The mining community was happy to see fees go up because, after the Bitcoin halving, their earnings had drastically decreased. But in May, Bitcoin miners’ daily earnings fell to less than $30 million.
Runes, like Ordinals, enable additional token standards on the Bitcoin blockchain, providing a more efficient tokenization method than BRC20. This has resulted in a rise in memecoin trading on Bitcoin, which recently completed its one billionth transaction. While many platforms struggle to acquire momentum, Runes has already achieved substantial success, with many Rune collections having market capitalizations in the hundreds of millions of dollars, according to data from Magic Eden. Casey Rodarmor also hinted to a unique audioreactive generative art project during an Ordinals event in Hong Kong, demonstrating the platform’s potential.