Author: Amaka Nwaokocha, CoinTelegraph; Translated by: Tao Zhu, Golden Finance
Activity at Rune Protocol has decreased significantly since the first week of trading. Activity dropped significantly on May 10, with very few new minters and new wallets interacting with the protocol.
According to the Dune Analytics dashboard, the protocol’s fee revenue has been steadily declining. While Runes still earns hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees per day on the Bitcoin blockchain, total fees have only exceeded $1 million twice in the past 12 days, showing a downward trend.
Runes is a new Bitcoin token standard that allows users to create fungible tokens on the blockchain, initiated by Casey Rodarmor, the creator of Ordinal. Ordinals enables non-fungible tokens on Bitcoin.
The Runes protocol debuted on April 20, coinciding with the latest Bitcoin halving event. The launch of Runes sparked investor frenzy, causing transaction fees to soar and generating a record windfall for Bitcoin miners, generating more than $135 million in fees in the first week alone.
Data from Dune Analytics shows that Runes-related transactions accounted for the majority of transactions on the Bitcoin network as of April 24. On April 23, Runes hit a peak transaction share of 81.3%, pushing Bitcoin's transaction share to 18.15%, with Ordinals and BRC-20 transaction shares each at 0.1%.
Rune trading continued to decrease over the next 9 days until May 2. Rune trading began to recover from May 3, and on May 4 and 5, the rune trading share returned to over 60%.
The mining industry welcomed the increase in fees as their revenues fell sharply after the Bitcoin halving. In May, total revenues for Bitcoin miners fell below $30 million per day.
Runes, like Ordinals, introduces a new token standard on the Bitcoin blockchain, which recently processed its billionth transaction.
Runes have been a huge success, with multiple Rune series valued at hundreds of millions of dollars, according to Magic Eden.
Additionally, Rodarmor recently hinted at an innovative audio-reactive generative art project at the Ordinals event in Hong Kong, further demonstrating the platform’s potential.