Bitcoin miners reaped the rewards of the Runes protocol launch, incomes elevated block subsidies after the Bitcoin halving.

The highly anticipated halving took space on April 19 at 8:09 p.m. ET, cutting the block subsidy reward paid out to miners down from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC.

Whereas this tournament will must possess theoretically slashed Bitcoin miners’ income by a predominant margin, a surge within the community’s transaction fee as a replace pushed miner income as much as a document $107.8 million on April 20, recordsdata from Ycharts reveals.

Round 75% of this income came from transaction charges,  according to recordsdata from Glassnode, with the reasonable transaction fee hitting a document $127.97,  and total income earned by miners from charges exceeding $81 million.

The spike in community charges was seemingly driven by the launch of Runes — a protocol launched by Bitcoin Ordinals creators Casey Rodamor, which makes use of Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO) as the root to voice fungible tokens on Bitcoin.



Runes enables customers to “etch” governance concepts and unchangeable attributes, with the probability of start or closed minting to realize tokens. It was in the beginning geared against fixing the congestion from BRC-20 tokens but the tremendous form of Runes projects which possess been minted almost today after its launch counsel it had the other enact.

“Staunch within the well-known 18 blocks, there’s been over $20 million in charges spent, most of that in Runes issuance. At this fee, Runes issuers would be spending $150 million a day or $1 billion a week,” commented just Bitcoin developer Jimmy Music in a blog post.

Earlier than the halving, miners earned a block reward of around 6.5 BTC per block, which integrated the 6.25 subsidy and a few minute transaction charges. After the halving, that reward was greater than 7 BTC per block, despite only 3.125 coming from the subsidy.

As of Sunday evening, the reasonable transaction charges on Bitcoin had settled to around 5 to 7 BTC per block — quiet considerably matching the levels seen before the halving.

“If the charges tumble extra, which is never any longer my injurious case, I ask hashrate within the community to tumble. Here’s a clear for atmosphere pleasant miners. Low vitality fee is a bonus,” renowned one market analyst on X.