Bearish sentiment abounds as Bitcoin has pulled back a whopping 15% from its all-time high over the past month. While that price decline may barely register for anyone who’s been around a full cycle, the world of bitcoin-denominated assets is really feeling the heat.
And none are sweating quite so much as runes.
You might be asking, “Why do you keep writing about shitcoins? I want to follow Bitcoin news!” Well, dear reader, as Bitcoin evolves and matures, the nature of the economic participants changes too.
We Bitcoiners know a couple things: 1) Bitcoin has to eventually discover a fee market and 2) shitcoins on bitcoin have been the greatest contributor to fee market activity this Halving period. If you look at the past 8 years of Bitcoin’s transaction history, it shows the impact of the post-ordinals economy on Bitcoin’s fee market.
So…let’s talk about runes!
Total runes market cap has crossed under $1 billion…. again.
The famous “seppuku chart” from Geniidata shows that the total market cap for runes is down over 50% from its all time high of $2.1 billion in mid-November.
This nod to the ancient samurai method of suicide comes from a tweet by runes creator Casey Rodarmor, which joked that, if runes assets did not surpass a $1 billion market cap, he would commit seppuku.
This isn’t the first time runes have sunk below the seppuku line; it happened multiple times this past summer, and the asset class reached an all time market cap low of ~$600 million last August.
The largest runes tickers are on a 2 month decline
Data guru SkyChirpLogic shows us that the top runes such as $DOG, $CYPHER, and $BDC have all been trending down since their peaks in November of 2024.
The normalized unit price shows an adjusted price view so we can tell which tokens have experienced relative outperformance/underperformance. In other words we can compare how each token has done compared to the others. Notably, we see the largest rune, $DOG, faring the best of all the largest caps, while AI rune $CYPHER experienced a modest pump, no doubt propelled by the surging AI narrative.
In their analysis, SkyChirp says, “$CYPHER & $RSIC show signs of a local bottom while $DOG, $BDC, $GIZMO, and $PUPS, are experiencing a decelerating downtrend.”
BRC20s generate 8x more on-chain activity than runes
If we have learned anything from crypto, it’s that technical design matters very little to short-term market sentiment.
Today, BRC20s generate 500% – 800% more on-chain activity than runes. In fact, BRC20s are on average ~30% of total transactions on the Bitcoin network these days. This helpful chart from Murch tells a story that the West seems to have missed entirely – namely, that Asia is big on trading BRC20s.
But how meaningful is data on transaction activity anyway? On-chain activity on Bitcoin is starting to look like it did during the 2022 bear market.
To give some context, even though runes are down bad, the on-chain Bitcoin economy is down worse. If you remember this time last year (Dec 2023 – Jan 2024) we saw a Cambrian explosion of Bitcoin metaprotocols: SRC-20, Atomicals, BRC-420, BRC-404, etc. All of these ecosystems have already disappeared and are lost to time. So in the grand scheme of things, maybe runes haven’t fared that poorly after all…. or perhaps they can go lower still.
