What caught our eye this week
Once again, naysayers will have to wait at least another hype cycle to proclaim that Runes and Ordinals are dead. Most notably, Runes ($1.89 billion) recently flipped BRC20s ($1.85 billion) in market cap after subsuming $1 billion since the beginning of October. Runes are now the largest token standard on Bitcoin.
Like it or not, these tokens represent serious economic activity on Bitcoin, so we should analyze them from a serious perspective and ask ourselves. For a deeper dive into some select Runes tokens that define this new Bitcoin economy, read our full newsletter this past week!
Today Runes alone account for over half of the transactions on Bitcoin, and they are clearly in the driver’s seat for now for next-block fee demand:
Bitcoin News
ASIC prices rebound hard on Bitcoin rally
Mining rig pricing has finally ended its slump as newer-gen hardware has increased 10% – 15% month-over-month. The real winners are the manufacturers, primarily Bitmain. Blockspace sources say that the majority of the demand continues to come from the USA, namely Texas, but also from Russia.
Microstrategy ($MSTR) flips Coinbase ($COIN)
Microstrategy shares pumped Wednesday to a high of $473, up 695% from where they started the year ($73). Microstrategy flipped Coinbase on Wednesday, with a market cap of $100 billion to Coinbase’s $80 billion. This has prompted questions about how long Microstrategy will continue to issue shares. The company has yet to deploy its newly raised $3 billion into bitcoin as of time of writing.
MagicEden releases $ME tokenomics
Bear with us, but this is shaping up to be one of the more interesting TGEs (Token Generation Events) in the Bitcoin-adjacent ecosystem. MagicEden is dropping a token later this year, but more notably, they have done over $80 billion – with a B! – in trading volume to-date and accounted for 60% of NFT usershare in 2023 (beating Opensea). The TGE is expected to be a major catalyst for the Bitcoin and Solana ecosystems.
Chart Infographic of the week
This monster of a timeline from Bito Ordileone gives the entire timeline of Ordinals, NFTs and how they came to Bitcoin. Obviously, step #1 is the invention of the computer.
