Bitcoin Rune powers the Bitcoin network with 1.6 million daily transactions.

Amidst increasing usage of Bitcoin for day-to-day purchases, the highest number of confirmed payments, however, went to the Bitcoin network.

Just three days after stepping into the new halving cycle on April 20, the Bitcoin network was able to process well over 1.6 million unique transactions between senders and receivers.

For example, comparing this data with that from blockchain.com and Glassnode showed that at the same time Bitcoin Runes had launched with the BRC-20 protocol on the Bitcoin blockchain, the daily transaction volume for Bitcoin spiked.

According to the data of Dune Analytics, Runes accounted for 81.3% of all Bitcoin transactions on April 23.

However, BTC in the end managed to recapture its share of transactions over the network. As of April 29, BTC represented 77.8% of all Bitcoin transactions, with Runes contributing 18.8%. Ordinal and BRC-20 are the remaining 1.2% and 2.3%, respectively, of transactions over the Bitcoin network.

You can check out this Cointelegraph guide for more on Bitcoin Runes and what sets them apart from BRC-20 tokens.

It also resulted in an increase in the number of transactions in Bitcoin Runes, which worked in the favor of the mining industry.

Two of the largest mining firms in the United States, Stronghold Digital Mining and Marathon, emphasized the positive influence of Runes from both a financial and functional perspective in their communication to Cointelegraph.

Rune transactions have added over 1200 BTC worth of tx fees to the miners since the Bitcoin Halving took effect.

While the fervor around Runes seems to be dying down, pseudonymous DeFi researcher Ignas actually does think it presents a real business opportunity. Ignas wrote in an April 17 X post:

"Runestone, RSIC, and PUPS are already peddling these and promising big, shiny new Rune token airdrops to holders. FOMO threads continue to come in by the dozen. But, as it always happens after the frenzy of a JPEG reveal for NFTs, it could soon cool off the market.". Runes and BRC-20 tokens are a new standard of fungible tokens looking to create more utility for Bitcoin in a new paradigm known as Bitcoin DeFi, or BTCFi.