- The network was overwhelmed with more than 232,000 transactions awaiting approval.
- Astronomical increase in commissions is associated with the launch of the Runes protocol
Earlier in the day, Bitcoin (BTC) halved, and contrary to what you might think, miners have been celebrating ever since.
Low rewards, high commissions
Although the rewards miners received for creating each block were halved, they were more than offset by an explosion in transaction fees paid by users.
According to an analysis of memory pool data by AMBCrypto, for a token block (840,000), miners are charged a whopping 37.62 BTC, which amounts to almost $2.4 million per year. Combined with the reduced block subsidy of 3.12 BTC, miners earned over $2.6 million per block. A few blocks after the halving, more than a million commissions were also collected.
Total fees have risen impressively, surpassing the Ordinals frenzy in December and just below the all-time high (ATH) reached in May 2023.
At the time of writing, transaction fees range from $50 to $60. In fact, there were over 232,000 transactions pending approval, and memory usage exceeded 300 MB.
Say hello to the runes
Popular Bitcoin market analyst Dylan Le Claire attributed the astronomical increase in fees to the new Runes token protocol, which was launched after the block halving.
Developed by Casey Rodmarmore, who also introduced the Bitcoin Ordinals concept last year, Runes also allows users to mint tokens on the Bitcoin chain. However, unlike ordinal inscriptions, each unit of runes is the same, meaning they can be exchanged.
According to the rune researcher, at the time of publication there were approximately 1,171 runes “engraved” (the term for creating them on a chain). The total number of transactions was close to 44,000, with commissions amounting to $12 million.
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Old fault lines are resurfacing
As with the Ordinals, the launch of Runes drove a wedge between Bitcoin purists and pragmatists. Dylan LeClair called Runes “pure degenerate speculation” that brings no benefit.
One Luna cryptocurrency trader complained about the technology’s complexity, calling it “total chaos.”
However, another user
Meanwhile, miners whose income streams suffered after the halving are not complaining at all.
This is an automatic translation of our English version.