The chart spiked before the coffee cooled. Bitcoin’s Runes protocol just hit 1 million inscriptions in 48 hours, and the network is clogged again. Mempool is a wall of red. Fees are kissing $80 per transaction. The average Bitcoin user—the one who bought a hardware wallet to store value—is now competing with degens minting dog memes on the oldest chain. This isn’t a bug. It’s a feature. But whose feature? And at what cost?
I’ve been in this space since the 2017 ICO frenzy sprint. I remember the rush of publishing the first Vietnamese-language breakdown of Golem’s IPFS integration within 24 hours. Speed was the only currency that mattered then. It still is. But the game has changed. Back then, we were building new rails. Now, we’re painting graffiti on the same tracks and calling it innovation.
Let’s rewind. Bitcoin’s Taproot upgrade, activated in November 2021, unlocked the ability to attach arbitrary data to satoshis. That opened the door for Ordinals—a protocol that lets you inscribe data (images, text, code) onto individual satoshis, turning them into NFTs. The idea was clever: use Bitcoin’s security to store immutable digital artifacts. Collectors went wild. By early 2023, Ordinals inscriptions were hitting hundreds of thousands per month. The network started to feel the strain.
Then came BRC-20, a token standard built on top of Ordinals using JSON inscriptions. It allowed for fungible tokens on Bitcoin—think of it as a poor man’s ERC-20. The degens smelled blood. Meme coins like ORDI and SATS launched, pumped, and dumped. The Bitcoin mempool became a casino floor. Miners raked in fees, but the average user—the one who just wants to send $50 to a friend—started paying $20 in transaction fees. That’s not progress. That’s a toll booth.
Now, in 2025, the Runes protocol has taken the baton. Runes, proposed by Casey Rodarmor (the same guy behind Ordinals), aims to make creating fungible tokens on Bitcoin more efficient than BRC-20. It uses UTXO-based accounting instead of the clunky “inscribe–deploy–mint” flow. The result? Explosive growth. Over 1 million Runes inscriptions in the first two days of its launch. The network is now processing more transactions than at any point since the 2021 bull run. But look closer. The majority of these transactions are mints, not transfers. They’re not real usage. They’re speculation wearing a technical disguise.
I’ve audited enough smart contracts to tell you the difference between utility and hype. DeFi Summer in 2020 taught me that liquidity follows the heat, but it also taught me that heat can burn the house down. The same pattern is repeating on Bitcoin. The difference is that Ethereum was designed for this chaos. Bitcoin was designed to be a decentralized store of value. Turning it into a meme-coin factory is like using a Rolls-Royce to haul cargo. It insults the car and doesn’t carry much.
The core insight here is simple: Bitcoin’s security model is the most expensive settlement layer in the world. Using it for low-value, high-volume token minting is economically irrational. Miners love it because fees spike. But the long-term health of the network depends on maintaining low fees for legitimate transactions. If every block is filled with junk, the cost of using Bitcoin as a savings vehicle becomes prohibitive. The very property that makes Bitcoin valuable—its reliability—starts to erode.
Data confirms this. Over the past 7 days, the average transaction fee on Bitcoin has surged from $5 to $80. The mempool count has grown from 10,000 to over 200,000 unconfirmed transactions. Meanwhile, the number of active addresses has remained flat at around 800,000 per day. That means the same number of users are paying more for the same activity. The only difference is the extra load from Runes and BRC-20 mints. This is a congestion tax on ordinary users, paid to a minority of speculators and miners.
Let me give you a specific example. I recently spoke with a Vietnamese freelancer who uses Bitcoin for cross-border payments. He sends $200 to his family every month. In the past two weeks, his transaction cost has tripled. He’s now considering switching to stablecoins on Ethereum Layer 2s. That’s a real-world impact. The narrative of “Bitcoin is the future of money” is undermined when the future becomes too expensive for the people who need it most.
Now, the contrarian angle. The market is currently cheering this activity. Bitcoin’s price is up 12% in the same period. The narrative is “Bitcoin is alive with innovation.” But the blind spot is the exit liquidity trap. When the minting frenzy ends—and it always does—the fees will collapse, and the miners who bought new ASICs betting on sustained high fees will be left holding the bag. The same thing happened after the 2017 ICO frenzy. Projects that raised millions on hype died when the music stopped. The difference is that those projects were on Ethereum, which had a built-in mechanism to absorb the shock (gas limit adjustments, EIP-1559). Bitcoin’s protocol is far less flexible. A fee spike is a pure tax on users, not a fee-burning mechanism that benefits holders.
Amidst the noise, the smart money whispers. I’ve been watching the flows of large Bitcoin holders (whales). They aren’t minting Runes. They’re transferring coins to cold storage. The ratio of accumulation to distribution has increased. This suggests that sophisticated players see the current frenzy as a temporary distraction. They’re not buying the narrative that Bitcoin should become a playground for token issuers. They’re betting on the original thesis: digital gold.
Let’s bring in the regulatory angle. Hong Kong’s virtual asset licensing regime, launched in 2023, is often cited as a progressive move. But I’ve written about this before. Hong Kong’s licensing isn’t about embracing innovation—it’s about stealing Singapore’s spot as Asia’s financial hub. The city is desperate to attract crypto capital after the 2022 crash. But its approach is selective. It approves Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs but bans retail trading of altcoins. Now, with Runes and BRC-20 creating a new class of Bitcoin-based tokens, regulators are confused. How do you classify a token that is technically a Bitcoin inscription? Is it a security? A commodity? A digital artifact? The lack of clarity will slow institutional adoption. The SFC (Securities and Futures Commission) has already issued a warning about “unregulated Bitcoin asset offerings.” The market is ignoring it, but that’s typical. Markets ignore regulation until enforcement hits.
I’ve survived the 2022 crash. I organized weekly crypto meetups in Ho Chi Minh City during the worst of the bear market. I saw retail investors hold onto their bags, hoping for a recovery, while developers continued building. The lesson I learned was that in downturns, emotional support and community solidarity are the most valuable content. Now, in a fragile recovery, the same principle applies. The Runes hype is a distraction from the real work: building scalable, cheap, and useful applications on Bitcoin. The Lightning Network exists. It works. It can handle millions of microtransactions for pennies. Why aren’t we pushing that? Because it’s not sexy. It doesn’t generate memes. It doesn’t pump the price of a random token. But it’s what Bitcoin needs to survive.
Pulse checks on the volatile heartbeat of exchange. The trading volume of Runes-based tokens on decentralized exchanges is already dropping. The initial spike of 10x has faded to 2x. The floor price of the top Rune collections is down 40% from the peak. This is the classic pattern of a liquidity grab. The first movers minted for free, dumped on the hype, and left latecomers holding the bag. I’ve seen this movie before. It played out in DeFi Summer with YAM, with Sushi, with every fork that promised a better mousetrap. The only difference is the blockchain.
Let me be clear: I’m not against experimentation. I’m a news cheetah. I break stories faster than anyone in the region. But I also have a responsibility to my readers to separate signal from noise. The signal here is that Bitcoin’s security model is being misused. The noise is that this is a “revolutionary” use case. It’s not. It’s a repeat of the 2017 ICO frenzy, but on a slower, more expensive base layer.
Digital gold rushes turn pixels into portfolios. The Runes protocol is a clever technical achievement. It’s more efficient than BRC-20. It integrates with Bitcoin’s UTXO model. But clever doesn’t mean useful. The question we should ask is: does this improve Bitcoin’s viability as a global monetary network? The answer is no. It degrades it. Every block that is filled with Rune minting transactions is a block that could have been used for a legitimate payment. The opportunity cost is real.
I’ve been tracking the behavior of miners. Publicly traded mining companies like Marathon and Riot have increased their hashrate, but they are also selling more of their mined Bitcoin to cover costs. The correlation between high fees and miner selling is historically bearish. When miners sell, the supply pressure increases. Combine that with the upcoming halving in 2028, and the narrative becomes messy. The market is pricing in the fee revenue, but not the selling pressure.
Now, the takeaway. Watch the mempool. Watch the average fee. If the congestion persists for more than 30 days, we will see a shift in user behavior. People will move to Ethereum Layer 2s, Solana, or even Bitcoin’s own Lightning Network. The Runes hype will die down, and the network will return to equilibrium. But the damage will be done: the narrative of “Bitcoin as a settlement layer for everything” will be replaced by “Bitcoin as a store of value, period.” That’s actually a good thing. It’s a return to fundamentals.
Riding the wave before it crashes back. I’m not calling a top. I’m calling a perspective shift. The next bull run won’t be driven by meme coins on Bitcoin. It will be driven by institutional adoption of Bitcoin as a reserve asset, by the growth of the Lightning Network as a payment rail, and by the maturation of Bitcoin’s security model as a global public good. The Runes experiment is a distraction. It’s a fun one, sure. But it’s not sustainable.
Speed is the only currency that matters now. I’ll be the first to break the story when the trend reverses. Until then, I’m watching the data. The mempool doesn’t lie. The fee curve doesn’t lie. The smart money is quiet, but it’s moving. Follow the wallets, not the tweets.
From frenzy to function: tracing the cycle. The cycle is clear. Hype arrives, prices spike, fees explode, users complain, regulation steps in, hype fades, and the survivors build. We’re in the hype phase of Runes. The building phase for Bitcoin’s true scaling solutions is already underway. The question is whether the market will reward the builders or the degens. History says the builders win in the long run. The degens just get the headlines.
I’ll leave you with this. The next time you see a Rune minting at 5x fee, ask yourself: is this the future of money, or just a casino on a Rolls-Royce? The answer will tell you everything about where the market is heading.
