According to PANews, activity on the Bitcoin Runes protocol has slowed down over the past week, showing that it has failed to gain significant traction among users despite a stellar start last month. Runes further optimizes the Ordinals protocol to make transactions cheaper and faster. According to data from Dune Analytics, the protocol issued more than 85,000 tokens in the first 10 days after Bitcoin’s fourth halving on April 20, generating more than $3 million in fees. However, over the past two weeks, all metrics - including fees, new Runes, and user activity - have dropped by more than 50%. Since May 1, only about 5,000 new Runes have been shipped, costing less than $100,000.
Runes dominated transactions and fees in the Bitcoin ecosystem at their peak, accounting for as much as 80% of network activity, but are now down to 20%. The decline occurred during an overall market downturn, with Bitcoin prices falling and altcoins growing slowly, which may have led to a drop in sentiment towards new technologies. "The success of Bitcoin L2 projects based on OP_Return is questionable because UTXO-based blockchain networks are fundamentally different from smart contract networks," said Ho Chan Chung, head of marketing at CryptoQuant.
