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Bitcoin is no longer boring or out of reach for retailers. It's fun, exciting, and ready to start a new era of innovation. For many years, Bitcoin has been seen as a store of value, or a store of capital. This meant buying his BTC using the Bitcoin blockchain, moving it to cold storage, and forgetting all about the world's largest network.
As a result, while Ethereum, Solana, and other blockchains are thriving and earning billions of dollars in fees, Bitcoin's blockchain has seen no fun, no activity, and no fees aside from rising prices. It remains relatively dormant with little innovation. . And since it's a $1 trillion asset class, most retailers can't even think of getting into BTC.
But now, the tide is turning, and Bitcoin is ready to experience all that and more for the first time. This not only attracts more people, boosts adoption, and fosters innovation, but also helps the Bitcoin blockchain find solutions to network security issues.
This new era of change is being ushered in by Loon, which helped Bitcoin miners collect a record $107 million in revenue in a single day. This alleviated concerns about the impact the halving would have on miners' revenues and Bitcoin's “long-term security budget.”
Even traditional financial institutions have noticed this surge in activity regarding Bitcoin, with Bernstein analysts stating:
“Bitcoin is experiencing a “Summer of Defi” similar to what Ethereum experienced in 2020. Multiple decentralized apps and tokens were launched on the Ethereum blockchain, leading to an increase in liquidity and transaction fees.”
Bernstein isn't alone. Franklin Templeton also mentioned Bitcoin's “resurgence of activity.”
Launched to coincide with last month's Bitcoin halving, there's a lot of excitement surrounding Runes. This is evident when you look at Bitcoin's average transaction fees, which trended flat but have come back with the launch of Rune Protocol. According to YCharts, fees were around $5 earlier this month, but on April 20th they exceeded $128 for the first time in history. This brought total transaction fees to an all-time high of $80 million.
According to data provided by Dune Analytics, the protocol itself has already recorded 1.9 million transactions and generated 1,366 BTC in fees. Meanwhile, data by NFT Pulse reveals that Bitcoin is the top chain in terms of transaction revenue.
A new era of Bitcoin
It all started with Ordinals, which allows users to embed data into the Bitcoin blockchain. According to Dune Analytics, Ordinal has been a huge success, with over 66 million Ordinal inscriptions created since 2022, generating over 6,777 BTC (worth $450.8 million) in fees.
Of course, things can always get better, and now Runes, created by fellow Ordinals developer Casey Rodarmor, has arrived. Runes utilizes Bitcoin's unspent transaction output (UTX) and stores the data in his OP_RETURN field of the transaction. In contrast, the current Bitcoin token standard BRC-20 is less efficient and can clog the network.
This means Rune is cheaper and more network efficient than previous standards while keeping all data on-chain. In this way, Runes can provide a more secure platform for launching and transacting alternative token projects such as meme coins.
The retail industry is already having fun with Bitcoin, with hundreds of tokens launched within a week. Additionally, the Runes ecosystem has grown to include DEXs, NFT marketplaces, launchpads, exchanges, lending protocols, explorers, analytics, and Runes-focused projects. Even centralized exchanges like OKX and Gate.io are jumping in and listing some of these newly minted runes. This shows how, over time, a vast and vibrant ecosystem surrounds Bitcoin.
All of this happens while the overall experience of creating and speculating on NFTs and meme coins in Bitcoin is still not seamless. This growth will only accelerate as technology and user experience improve and people realize Rune's true potential.
This means that this is just the beginning and that project prices, activities, and fees may decline in the short term. As you can already see, the price is back to $32. But in the long run, once the hype subsides, it will spark a real frenzy of ingenuity, integration, and practicality. Soon, Runes will become his billion dollar ecosystem, bringing with it new blockchain features and new excitement.
With all of this enthusiasm, accessibility, and technological superiority, Rune is poised to change the Bitcoin landscape. We need more legitimate gamefi, defi, and overall infrastructure in place. The top 10 market cap rune is a meme and we will see this change in the coming months.
All in all, Bitcoin's vast potential has been dormant until now, but with Rune, BTC is poised to realize all these possibilities. The base layer has already spent the past decade establishing itself as a secure and robust blockchain. Now, retailers will once again have access to Bitcoin and experience its immense value, taking Bitcoin to new heights.
