TL;DR
Full Story
Damn, what’s up with Bitcoin right now??
Activity has recently exploded on the chain, with miners raking in a cool $80M in transaction fees this past weekend alone.
So what was it? (The halving?)
Nope! It was Runes, which have taken a key feature from Ethereum, and added it to Bitcoin.
Confused? Here’s what we’re on about:
All cryptocurrencies are just software.
Back in the day, if you wanted to start a brand new crypto coin/token — you had to write your own software (or copy/paste someone else’s).
Then Ethereum came along and was like:
“Hey, we’ve created a system that lets you piggy back off our software and network — all you need to do is tell us what you want to call your token, how many tokens you want generated, and we’ll host it (processing transactions for a fee).”
All of a sudden, new tokens were popping up left, right and center (this was known as the ‘ICO boom’) — and every time these tokens were traded, they boosted the value of the Ethereum network.
Runes does that for Bitcoin — allowing users to launch their own tokens on the Bitcoin network.
Which wouldn’t be anything special if it weren’t Bitcoin (most new blockchain projects allow users to add their own tokens to the network — it ain’t a rarity!).
BUT!
Because Bitcoin has the most amount of value sloshing around in it ($1.3T as of this writing), it incentivizes folks to create tokens on the network, in an attempt to syphon some of that value into their newly created token.
…and incentivized they have been!
Our bet is that this $80M in fees is just the start of a new boom for Bitcoin.
