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.
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 as Runes as percent 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.
