Transactions on the Bitcoin network reached a new all-time high of 926,842 transactions just three days after the halving.
Bitcoin accumulated over 926,000 daily transactions on April 23, surpassing the previous high of over 731,000 transactions reached in December 2023, according to Glassnode.
Number of Bitcoin transactions, all-time chart. Source: Glassnode
The record number of daily transactions occurred three days after the April 20 halving, which coincided with the launch of Bitcoin Runes, a new protocol for issuing fungible tokens on the Bitcoin network.
Operations with runes make up the lion's share in the Bitcoin network – about 68% of all transactions. According to Dune, investors carried out a total of 3.6 million rune-related transactions.
Runes, share of transactions. Source: Dune.
According to Nazar Khan, co-founder and CEO of TeraWulf, while runes may not remain the dominant token standard on the Bitcoin network, they are a testament to the value of Bitcoin's block space.
“Runes and ordinals demonstrate the value of block space… Bitcoin is the most decentralized, secure and reliable network in existence, so there will be use cases and value extracted from that block space,” Khan said in an interview.
Despite the record number of transactions, the price of Bitcoin remains low, just above $64,000.. The world's number one cryptocurrency fell more than 9% on the monthly chart, according to CoinMarketCap.
BTC/USDT/1-day chart. Source: CoinMarketCap
While Runes has generated significant interest in the Bitcoin community, real market opportunities may not emerge until months after the initial wave of investor hype dies down, according to pseudonymous decentralized finance (DeFi) researcher Ignace, who wrote in an April 17 X-post :
“Runestone, RSIC and PUPS are already pumping, promising new shiny Rune token giveaways to holders. And the topics about FOMO keep popping up.. But, as with the NFT frenzy following the advent of JPEG, the market may soon cool down.”
Due to their initial worthlessness, runes could trade like volatile memcoins immediately after launch, Ignace warned.