According to Cointelegraph, the Bitcoin Runes protocol has generated $162.4 million in revenue through 15.6 million transactions in four months since its launch in August.

According to Dune Analytics data, Runes had the highest trading volume in the first two months, with an average daily trading volume of more than 300,000. On April 23, NFT investors conducted more than 1 million transactions in minting, etching, transfer and fiat transactions, accounting for 81.3% of the total bandwidth of the Bitcoin network.

However, the average daily transaction volume of Runes has dropped to about 50,000 in the past two months. Since July 16, Bitcoin (BTC) has regained its dominance over the network, accounting for about 90% of the network share, with the remaining 10% shared by Ordinal BRC-20 and Runes.

The Runes protocol is favored by many investors as an efficient successor to Bitcoin Ordinals and a competitor to BRC-20. In the past four months, Runes has had a higher daily trading share than BRC-20 on most days, with BRC-20 outperforming Runes only on 13 days.

Of the 15.6 million Runes transactions, minting transactions accounted for over 9 million, and fiat and etching transactions accounted for 6.5 million and 91,500 respectively.

Decentralized finance researcher Ignas said that the real market opportunity for Runes may appear a few months after its launch. Bitcoin L2 network Stacks is also preparing to launch trading solutions for Runes, BRC-20 and Ordinals.