Runes protocol activity has significantly decreased since the first week of its launch. Especially on May 10, there was a notable decline in activity with very few new crypto projects and new wallets interacting with the protocol compared to previous periods. Blockchain data analysis platform Dune’s dashboard indicates that the protocol’s commission revenue is steadily falling.
Interest in the Bitcoin Ecosystem Is Waning
Although Runes earns hundreds of thousands of dollars daily on the Bitcoin blockchain, total commission fees have only surpassed one million dollars twice in the last twelve days, indicating a significant downward trend. The Runes protocol has been active for three weeks since its initial launch, which coincided with the last Bitcoin halving event on April 19. The launch of Runes triggered a frenzy among investors, leading to an increase in transaction fees and record revenue for Bitcoin miners, followed by an unexpected drop; over 135 million dollars in commission fees were generated in just the first week.
Dune Analytics data shows that until April 24, transactions related to Runes constituted the majority of transactions on the Bitcoin network. On April 23, Runes accounted for 81.3% of the transaction share, reducing Bitcoin’s transaction share to 18.15%; Ordinals and BRC-20 transactions each recorded 0.1%.
What’s Happening on the Runes Front?
Runes transactions steadily decreased until May 2 over the following nine days. From May 3, Runes began to recover. On May 4 and May 5, Runes pushed its transaction share above 60%. The mining community welcomed the increased fees following the Bitcoin halving event, as their earnings significantly decreased. However, in May, the total revenue for Bitcoin miners fell below 30 million dollars daily.
Like Ordinals, Runes offers a more efficient tokenization solution than BRC-20 by unlocking new token standards on Bitcoin’s blockchain network. This led to an increase in memecoin trade volume on Bitcoin, which recently completed its billionth transaction.
According to data from Magic Eden, although many platforms initially struggled to attract interest, Runes has already achieved significant success with several Runes collections worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
