Over the past six days, the daily average contribution of Runes to miners’ fees was less than 2 BTC, a significant decrease compared to the record of 881 bitcoins on April 24th.
The daily average trading volume of the new token standard Runes in the Bitcoin ecosystem was only 37,820 between June 22 and 28, a decrease of nearly 90% from the average of 331,040 between June 9 and 15. On June 24, the volume was only 23,238, marking the lowest trading volume since the fourth bitcoin halving event on April 20.
Since the launch of Runes, the average daily contribution to miners over the past six days has been less than 2 BTC, a significant decrease compared to the record of 881 BTC on April 24.
In fact, the income of Bitcoin miners mainly comes from two parts: block rewards and transaction fees. While block rewards (i.e., newly generated bitcoins) are fixed, transaction fees vary according to the volume of transactions and network congestion. Therefore, when the number of transactions increases and the network is congested, transaction fees also rise, thereby increasing the total income of miners.
In contrast, the transaction fees provided to miners by Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens are even lower than those provided by Runes, which were initially considered a new source of income for Bitcoin miners.
With the downturn in the Bitcoin ecosystem and the halving event, yesterday (29th), Ki Young Ju, the founder and CEO of the cryptocurrency analytics firm CryptoQuant, responded to a question about the situation of mining enterprises from the cost production perspective. Additionally, Jan Wuestenfeld, an economist focusing on Bitcoin and a mining expert, stated that the decline in hash prices has put tremendous pressure on inefficient miners since the fourth Bitcoin halving in April. Today, Ki Young Ju expressed agreement with a netizen’s view that “the surrender of small miners is a bullish sign, which is usually a characteristic of a bull market.”