On April 20, the day of the fourth Bitcoin halving, miners on the network generated over $100 million in revenue, according to Glassnode.
This was due to the simultaneous launch of the Runes protocol, which was implemented on the blockchain on April 20, just like the fourth Bitcoin halving.
Runes is a new token protocol created to allow the minting of fungible tokens in BTC satoshis units, much like Ordinals inscriptions. In fact, the creator of Runes, Casey Rodamor, is the same creator of the Ordinals protocol, which massively attracted the attention of the crypto community to Bitcoin and renewed the industry's interest in the leading cryptocurrency and blockchain.
With the launch of Runes, Rodamor managed to exalt the crypto community once again, causing a frenetic activity on the blockchain.
Bitcoin breaks new records
According to Glassnode data, the activity generated by the runes was of great benefit to Bitcoin miners who, instead of seeing their income halved by the arrival of the new halving, broke historical profit records.
Cryptocurrency blogger Colin Wu cited Glassnode data on his X account, which shows that on the day of the halving and the launch of Runes Bitcoin network miners' revenue from transaction fees was nearly $80,5 million.
In total, Bitcoin miners generated $106,7 million in revenue on April 20, of which 75,4% came from transaction fees on the network, the crypto blogger cited.
On the other hand, the halving block, block #840.000, collected 37,6 BTC in commission fees, worth over $2,4 million USD, on April 20. The blockchain’s fourth halving block is one of the most valuable so far on the network.
Commission rates exceeded $200 dollars
The frenzy triggered by Runes on the Bitcoin blockchain significantly pushed up the network’s commission fees, which reached new all-time highs. On April 20, these fees exceeded 2.200 sat/vB for high-priority transactions, equivalent to more than $202 USD.
Source: Mempool.space
At the time of writing, network fee rates have dropped significantly and appear to have normalized, hovering around 122 sat/vB (about $10) for high-priority transactions. However, over 220.000 BTC transactions remain on hold to confirm, exposing some of the congestion caused by Runes activity on the Bitcoin network.
More than 7.000 runes in Bitcoin
To date, The number of runes recorded on the Bitcoin blockchain reaches 7.150, According to data from the Rune Alpha platform, which also shows that the number of transactions made with this protocol is more than 1 million and that there are currently around 85.700 owners of these digital assets.
Meanwhile, the price of Bitcoin is above $60.000 per BTC, showing a 10% recovery since January 18, when its price had fallen to below $59.600 following new reports of attacks between Israel and Iran, as reported by this media.
Continue reading: Japan reportedly considering issuing a Bitcoin ETF
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