Bitcoin {{BTC}} started the week stable, changing hands above $65,800, as transaction fees have significantly lowered following the halving.
On-chain data from Mempool.space shows that medium-priority transactions are now costing $8.48 while high-priority transactions cost $9.32.
In the initial aftermath of the halving, these fees spiked to over $146 for a medium-priority transaction and $170 for a high-priority transaction.
The hashprice index, a metric created by Luxor to quantify how much a miner can expect to earn from a specific quantity of hashrate, has also dropped from $182.98 per hash/day to $81, a level below where it was at pre-halving.
While bitcoin miners anticipated that the halving would significantly cut revenue, the introduction of Casey Rodarmor’s Runes protocol – designed to create fungible tokens on Bitcoin – which went live at the halving, was supposed to be the antidote to this, given the level of activity it would create on-chain.
Instead, in the initial days after the event, floor prices for the runestone NFT collection have dropped by almost 50% in the last 24 hours with a floor price of nearly 0.037 BTC, according to Magic Eden, while ordinal collections like Bitcoin Pullets and NodeMonkes are up 11% and 8% respectively
It should be noted that these ordinal collections also generate considerable transaction fees but don’t appear to be the same revenue source as many hoped Runes would be.