The launch of the Runes protocol has seriously supported the income of miners after halving due to the growth of commissions. This was stated by co-founder and CEO of TeraWulf Nazar Khan in an interview with Cointelegraph.
On the day of the fourth halving of the block reward on April 20, the average transaction fee jumped to a record $128.45. According to BitInfoCharts, at the time of writing, the indicator has adjusted to ~$13.
At least in the first day or two, operations with Runes significantly increased the amount of commissions, which led to an increase in the hash rate, Khan admitted.
As the fixed block reward decreased from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC, it became a "joker" for bitcoin miners, he added.
The daily income of miners fell from $107.7 million on the day of halving to $36.4 million as of April 25. The share of commissions in the indicator increased from 75% ($81 million) to 19% ($7.06 million), respectively.
Data: Blockchain.com .The previous few days, the fees brought the miners up to 30% of the revenue. According to Khan, with this value, it was about an additional income of 1 BTC per block, "which is important."
When planning the profitability of work after halving, the company assumed that the cost of bitcoin mining would be $37,000 with a 10% commission rate. Any excess of this figure means that mining at TeraWulf becomes more profitable, Khan stressed.
According to CoinShares experts, the average amount of fees in revenue in the coming months will be approximately 15%. Only on peak days, the indicator will reach 30%, the company admitted.
The hype around Runes has noticeably subsided since launch: the share in transactions has decreased from a maximum of 81% to 30%, according to the dashboard data on Dune. In the amount of commissions received by miners, the indicator decreased from 69.5% to 16%.
Data: Dune.Recall that Franklin Templeton analysts named Runes, along with Ordinals, L2 solutions and DeFi primitives, one of the main drivers of the revival of innovation in bitcoin.