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Bitcoin Runes, a leading NFT protocol, generated $162.4 million in fees with over 15.6 million transactions, indicating its potential for long-term market impact.
Bitcoin Runes, a protocol for non-fungible tokens that launched in August, generated $162.4 million in fees with 15.6 million transactions in four months. According to Dune Analytics, Runes recorded the majority of transactions in the first two months, often exceeding 300,000 transactions per day. On April 23 alone, NFT investors made over a million transactions, representing 81.3% of the total Bitcoin network bandwidth. In contrast, daily Runes transactions have decreased in the past two months, recording an average of around 50,000 daily transactions.
The Bitcoin Runes protocol initially dominated daily transactions post-launch, but is now declining as BTC regains network dominance. In the two months since July 16, the original Bitcoin has consistently covered about 90% of the network, while the remaining 10% is shared between Ordinal BRC-20 and Runes.
The Rise of Bitcoin Runes NFTs
The Runes protocol has been promoted as an effective successor to Bitcoin Ordinals and a competitor to BRC-20, favored by many investors over both.
Over the past four months, Runes has outpaced BRC-20 in terms of daily transaction share on most days. As the chart below shows, BRC-20 has outpaced Runes in just 13 days. Of the 15.6 million Runes transactions, more than 9 million were mints, 6.5 million were decrees, and 91,500 were engravings.
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A decentralized finance researcher by the pseudonym Ignas recently noted that the real market opportunity for Runes could come a few months after launch. He said:
“Runestone, RSIC, and PUPS are already pumping, promising shiny new Rune token airdrops to their owners. And the FOMO threads keep coming. But, like the NFT craze after the JPEG reveal, the market may soon cool down.”
Bitcoin L2 network Stacks is also preparing to launch a trading solution for Runes, BRC-20s, and Ordinals inscriptions.