Key Points
- Bitcoin’s transaction fees crashed after reaching a record daily volume of $128 on halving day.
- Now, Bitcoin is trading at around $66k, up by about 1.7% in the past 24 hours.
Bitcoin completed its fourth halving on April 20, when the miner rewards were slashed from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC.
The average fees paid on Bitcoin have sharply dropped a day after reaching a record average of $128 on the leaving day. As of April 21, the transaction fees have dropped to an average of $8 – $10 for medium-priority transactions, according to the data from mempool.space.
A day before, Bitcoin saw $78.3 million in total fees, managing to beat Ethereum by more than 24 times, according to Crypto Fees. The day recorded 37.7 BTC paid to Bitcoin miner ViaBTC in the Bitcoin halving block at height 840,000 – this made it the most sought-after piece of digital real estate in the Bitcoin network history of 15 years.
Much of the demand at block number 840,000 came from memecoin and nonfungible token fans competing to inscribe and etch rare satoshis via the Runes protocol.
The Runes protocol – a new fungible token standard for Bitcoin – launched the very same day as the Bitcoin halving. On April 20, OXK exchange announced the OKX Web3 Wallet Runes Market is officially online.
In an official announcement, the exchange reveals that it added support for Runes, Casey Rodarmor’s new fungible token standard. Rodarmor is a former Bitcoin developer and artist.
UniSat, a Bitcoin service provider that supports inscription assets, has also announced on X the launch of Runes.
At the moment of writing this article, Bitcoin is trading a little above $66k, up by about 1.7% in the past 24 hours on CoinMarketCap.
Bitcoin miners remain optimistic
Bitcoin halvings are designed to regulate the supply of new Bitcoin tokens, and history has demonstrated that the event had a significant impact on token supply dynamics, market sentiment, and adoption as well.
This year, the effects of the halving could be different for miners, compared to the previous events, as the investors’ interest slightly shifted from miner shares to Bitcoin ETF products that had been approved at the beginning of the year in the US and about three months after, by Hong Kong as well.
Other optimistic factors for miners post-Bitcoin halving include Ordinals and Runes.