RETURN OF THE RUNE

Runes market cap added $500 million in past week.

24 May  2024 · Block Height 844850 · Bitcoin Price $67K

You thought Runes were dead—think again.

Quick Hits

Chart of the Week

The HODL Cave–showing the relative investor holding of coins to the duration coins are held–is the tightest it’s ever been

Runes Come Roaring Back

Maybe “DOG” will, in fact, “GO•TO•MOON.”

We’re merely one month past the Bitcoin halving, but that’s multiple narrative cycles in crypto-land. If you remember, the Halving saw skyrocketing network fees as Runes Mania hit, and then immediately died. Some were quick to call the phenomenon a let down and resume the bear market, but degens apparently just needed to catch their breath….

The Runes Market Cap has added over $500 million (80%) in the past week.

Total Runes Market Cap h/t Geniidata

Casey is breathing a sigh of relief: Casey Rodarmor, the mad scientist behind Ordinals & Runes, jokingly (we hope) said he would be [ashamed] if the total Runes market cap doesn’t exceed $1 billion within 1 month of launch. By our estimate, Casey just barely squeaked by.

DOG•GO•TO•THE•MOON is the current market leader and the airdrop from the Runestone pre-Rune Inscription collection. “$DOG” accounted for ~$200m of the total $500m market cap increase. Other notable Runes tokens such as $RSIC and $PUPS are also up on the week. Lastly, it appears that political Runes memecoins have caught a bid.

Runes as % of Bitcoin transaction fee percentage remains significant, but largely flat

However the market rally hasn’t resulted in on-chain activity. Almost the entirety of the activity has been on secondary markets and not translated to significant increase in on-chain fees.

While there have been a net increase in Runes mint activity over the past week, the driver of fees from fungible tokens like BRC20s & Runes has been in their competitive bidding. In a relatively calm “minting” environment as we’ve seen this month, we aren’t seeing a lot of competition to get mints into blocks — rather it’s been a relatively low-competition minting environment.

Lastly, Runes are clearly the darling fungible token protocol over BRC-20s right now. BRC-20s now comprise under 15% of all fungible token mints.

Where will the future of Bitcoin fungible tokens go? Who knows—but the market clearly isn’t done for the time being.

Blockspace Podcasts

🎙️ Memecoins, Scaling Grifts and Other Shenanigans With Colluding Node

Welcome back to The Gwart Show! This week, Colluding Node from the Celestia joins Gwart to unravel the mystery of memecoins, stablecoins, governance tokens, Ethereum scaling via grifters and how Celestia works under the hood. Gwart and C-Node talk about like 20+ blockchains in this podcast so it probably has something for everyone.

🎙️Minting The Second Rune Ever With Mike Hamilton

Chief Research Officer at Bitcoin miner Griid, Mike Hamilton is an experienced & well-known Bitcoin miner. But even more impressive might be his feat snagging of the second Runes ticker once the moment the protocol launched last April.

Before the weekend, mind sending this to a colleague or friend?